Silent Night, John Woo’s Latest, Reviewed

When I was in high school and college, John Woo was one of the directors that we talked about excitedly. The Killer, A Better Tomorrow, and Hard Boiled were all awesome. When we heard that not only was John Woo coming to Hollywood, but he was going to be directing Jean-Claude Van Damme? Holy cow, we went nuts. Yeah, we bought tickets to Hard Target. Heck yeah, we bought tickets to Face-Off. Somewhere between Mission Impossible 2 and Paycheck, though… well, I stopped going out of my way to buy John Woo movie tickets.

I was still a big fan of his early stuff, of course… but he was such a master of action scenes that his toolkit was picked up by *EVERYBODY* and so if you wanted to see a John Woo-esque action scene, you could get one anywhere. Heck, on top of that, some of the people who made tributes/rip-offs of John Woo were capable of directing actors in scenes that were other than shootouts or melee.

So he sort of fell off my radar… until earlier this year when I saw that he was coming out with a new one.

Here’s the trailer (warning: contains graphic violence):

I was hooked from the trailer alone. When I read an article about it, I found out that the movie wasn’t going to have dialog in it. What? No dialog? Holy cow! That’s why it’s called “Silent Night”!!! Brilliant! And so I tried talking a bunch of buddies into catching it and, last Friday, one of my friends who had never seen a John Woo movie before said “Let’s catch a matinee” and we met at Tinseltown and caught a 10:30 showing.

As we walked out, I told my buddy “You’ve now seen every single John Woo movie.” “You laughed during the scene where he put on the trenchcoat and spun… was it because he stole that from The Matrix?” “Oh, man.” I then explained a little bit of what John Woo brought to the whole “action movie” thing over lunch.

So how was the movie? Well, I’d have to say that it’s *INTERESTING*. Now, they sold it as a “movie without dialog” but there was a *LOT* of “cheating”. I’m not talking about stuff like “hearing police radios” or “getting in a car and hearing the DJ say what day it is” because there’s plenty of that sort of thing. But characters text each other and we see the text bubbles on the screen. One of the characters writes a note to another character and we see the text of the note. There are several scenes where we see people talking, like, through a window so we can’t hear what they’re saying (but, of course, it’s not really important what they’re saying). And, it should be noted, there is an interaction with a character who has a gag in his mouth. He communicates with vowels. “UUUU OOOO!”, he yells muffledly.

So it’s not *WITHOUT* dialog (and, honestly, I think that they could have easily not shown us the texts or the words in the letter) but seeing a movie without more than a thimblefull of dialog is *INTERESTING*. You’re constantly surrounded by people talking whenever you’re not in the basement. Just something as simple as a run to the Safeway or Baskin Robbins will have you inundated with conversation. Couples chatting as they pick out which version of Hamburger Helper they want. Moony teenagers discussing the pros and cons of Rocky Road.

A movie where the main characters don’t talk? That creates a weird movie experience. You’re paying twice as much attention to everything because of how common little conversations are and this is a movie pretty much without them. My buddy mentioned that he found himself leaning forward several times because he kept waiting for people to talk to each other.

That said, the movie comes across as more of a proof-of-concept than a movie in its own right.

The plot? Well, it’s all right there in the trailer.

The direction? You can see John Woo talking with his editor asking “Do you think it’s too subtle?” Like, there’s a scene where the Big Bad is dancing with his girl as the protagonist is shooting his way up the building. It’s a dance… OF DEATH!!! Get it? Well, maybe we should put some skulls in there.

The movie also has the longest montage scene I’ve ever seen in a movie. We see our protagonist start from nothing and go from there to get good at shooting, driving, hand-to-hand knife combat, pugilism, building muscle, and detective work. This takes, like, a half hour! Then we do some final setup for right before the final conflagration and, woo doggies, do we get a great final conflagration. You know how Confucius said “Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves”? Well, this guy needed to dig about 20 or 30. John Woo outdid himself in the last third of this movie. Two-fisted action, dual handguns, chicks shooting machine guns, and everything you go to John Woo movies for.

It’s just that the first two-thirds of the movie don’t quite work. The movie fails… but it’s an *INTERESTING* failure. It’s not going to win any “best Christmas movie that isn’t Die Hard” polls but it probably should be shown in film classes for the next decade or so getting people to discuss what worked and what didn’t and what could be done to make a movie like this actually succeed at what it’s going for.

When it comes out on Netflix, check it out. It’s interesting.

So… what are you watching?