- Starring
- Joel Kinnaman, Catalina Sanino Moreno
- Director
- John Woo
- Rating
- R
- Genre
- Action
- Release date
- December 1, 2023
Overall Score
Rating Overview
Rating Summary
Action movies like Silent Night have been a cinematic staple since 1903’s The Great Train Robbery first wowed audiences. Since then, Action has splintered into a myriad of subgenres to entertain and titillate. Revenge films, in particular, with their characteristic blend of adrenaline-pumping schadenfreude and righteous retribution, are among the favorites of red-blooded cinephiles.
Silent Night
When Brian Godlock’s son and voicebox become an inner city gang fight’s collateral damage on Christmas Day, Brian decides to go full Punisher and wipe out those responsible for his terrible loss.
Silent Night’s marketing does a great job of making the film look like a quick-paced revenge fantasy come to life, one that speaks to the rage monster buried deep within modern domesticated man. Unfortunately, it’s mostly a boring bust.
There is virtually no dialogue, which has the potential to be interesting but ends up as an awkward gimmick as even those who can speak in the film do not for no good reason.
As revenge porn goes, Silent Night is pretty unimpressive and predictable. At 1h 44m long, it feels an hour overlong. What’s worse is that it offers absolutely nothing new, and while clichés can still be fun if done correctly, John Woo’s Silent Night serves up all of its telegraphed action beats with the panache and skill of a first-time director who once heard about John Woo movies.
Its training montage is trite and boring and a little bit silly, as Brian learns knife fighting while watching YouTube videos and becomes the world’s greatest marksman (capable of firing one-handed out the window of a fast-moving vehicle and tagging each moving target with surgical precision) after practicing on stationary targets during a couple of trips to the gun range.
Not even hinting that Brian was a bad@$$ in his past life before all of these John Wick shenanigans stretches the willful suspension of disbelief beyond most audience members’ abilities.
Further complicating things is the film’s main baddie, who is an entirely generic throwaway gang banger right up until he suddenly transforms into an uninteresting generic throwaway 80s B movie villain in the last minutes of the third act.
However, the most frustrating thing about Silent Night is that the underrated Joel Kinneman is utterly wasted in this. Do yourself a favor and watch his best work to date in season 1 of Netflix’s Altered Carbon.
WOKE ELEMENTS
None
James Carrick
James Carrick is a passionate film enthusiast with a degree in theater and philosophy. James approaches dramatic criticism from a philosophic foundation grounded in aesthetics and ethics, offering insight and analysis that reveals layers of cinematic narrative with a touch of irreverence and a dash of snark.
9 comments
Kent
December 20, 2023 at 2:20 pm
The new pop up ads on this website are ruining the user experience, I find it hard to click on anything
James Carrick
December 20, 2023 at 3:29 pm
Hmm. There shouldn’t be any new pop up ads right now. We’ll look into it. If you could provide us a with a screenshot, it would be exceptionally helpful. You can send it to [email protected]
In the meantime, we invite you to consider our ads-free membership. The first month is free for the monthly membership and annual members get a vacation.https://worthitorwoke.com/membership-account/membership-levels/
James Carrick
December 20, 2023 at 11:50 pm
I couldn’t find any instances of pop ups but I’ve made some changes that will hopefully help.
b
December 20, 2023 at 8:09 pm
Well, at least it isn’t woke! Looking forward to a Migration review.
M.K
January 1, 2024 at 8:40 pm
While I agree with you that Joel Kinnamen is underrated, Altered Carbon is highly woke, and maybe instead of referring people directly to the Netflix page, you could refer them to your review of it (if there is one).
Woke points include:
-all the evil and “privileged” people are white
-interracial relationship
-high levels of diversity
-adding neo nazis, just cause.
-black girl-boss who’s also super smart and has the answer to everything
There’s probably more that I’m forgetting, but as a person who loved the imagery and watched it at release while I was significantly less bothered by woke, even at that point I found it too overt. Some people might want a heads up for the contents before watching. I do however fully agree that Kinnamen did a great job and he was the best part of the show by far.
Joel Kinnamen can be found in “The Killing” (also made by Netflix I think) which is considerably less woke (only thing I can think of off hand is the main character is a female cop/detective) and he does an excellent job in it.
James Carrick
January 1, 2024 at 8:46 pm
Thank you for your input. When we have available reviews, we link to them. Altered Carbon was released in 2018, and we turn 1 next month. So, our catalog of older films and programs is understandably thin.
M.K
January 1, 2024 at 9:22 pm
For sure, totally fair- maybe just something to keep in mind while linking woke (or woke-ish) media directly from based reviews in the future = ). If I had no experience with Altered Carbon, I would assume it was based since it was linked from a based review.
Regardless thanks for the response, and I am enjoying the site so far.
M.K
January 1, 2024 at 10:30 pm
More Altered Carbon Woke points (courtesy of my husband, whose memory is much better than mine)
-Transhumanism / Genderbending
-False Utopia
-Romanticization of Islam
-Queer relationships and normalization of LGBT (pretty sure there’s polygamy/thresome at some point)
-Male Rape via drugging
-Multiple Girl Bosses
-Neo colonalism / Racism messaging
-Anti Male-Gaze and messages regarding sexulization
Overall Altered Carbon makes a stab at tying in all the general woke themes that are present in other cyberpunk shows/media however it lacks all of the counter signaling that shows it’s audience that these things should be viewed as negatives or the media as a cautionary tale. Altered Carbon portrays it’s messaging and themes as sincere and with little cynicism. It is entirely “what you see is what you get”.
Anyway, just figured I’d post the other points we remembered.
Matt S
January 2, 2024 at 1:45 am
Joel Kinnaman is outstanding as a red-blooded NASA astronaut in ‘For All Mankind’ on Apple TV.
It’s a science fiction series based on the premise that the Russians were the first to land on the moon in 1969. Ironically, this has the effect of spurring the American efforts, and consequently leads to much greater success in colonising/exploring of space.
I reckon Season 1 is not woke at all, as it is set in the 1960s, but a few woke elements do appear in subsequent series. Not enough to spoil it though.