The Doctor’s Diagnosis: A-
Violent Night is one of those concepts that seems so obvious and simple that it’s amazing that it took so long for someone to make it: It’s Die Hard, but what if it was Santa Claus instead of John McClane? Fucking brilliant, right? Why hasn’t anyone done this before? While Violent Night isn’t in the same league as Die Hard (not that I expected it to be, as I consider Die Hard to be a perfect movie and possibly the best action movie ever made), it is still a damn fun movie and perfect for those that like their holiday joviality to be laced with a lot of good-humored bloodshed.
The film takes place at the mansion of an ungodly rich family as they get together for Christmas. When I say ungodly rich, I mean they make Kevin McCallister’s family look poor. They have their own security service, a fleet of servants and generally seem like the kind of family that grew up in Connecticut and haven’t worked a day in their lives. Most importantly, they have a vault containing $300 million, which prompts a gang of robbers to invade the house, mercilessly kill the staff, take the family hostage and begin the task of breaking into the vault. There is one thing that they didn’t count on, though: Santa Claus is on the premises, he’s a bit drunk and all these robbers are on his naughty list.
The centerpiece of the film is David Harbour as the badass Saint Nick, playing it as a cross between Billy Bob Thornton in Bad Santa and Bruce Willis in the aforementioned classic. I have heard some critics take issue with the action-hero vibe of Santa in this movie, but I think that is missing some of the nuances of the performances. It might be a bit unnecessary to introduce the backstory that Santa was a Viking warrior in his younger days, and I would agree that the film would work without this exposition, but Santa is also a reluctant hero here. As the film opens in a bar, we are introduced to a Santa that has become a cynical drunk, having grown tired of kids that don’t really believe and would rather have phones than toys. Even when he finds himself in the middle of a hostage situation, he initially wants to leave and only finally helps when he realizes that the little girl stuck in the house is on the nice list. It is really like Die Hard in both a plot sense and a character sense; just like John McClane, this is a dude in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Once Santa does enter the fray, though, the violence goes on another level from Die Hard. There is a missed opportunity with the fantasy elements, as the supernatural elements of Santa rarely come into play (although they do result in the film’s best kill, which involves a really creative use of a chimney). However, despite this shortcoming, it is oddly satisfying to watch Santa smash his way through dozens of henchmen with a sledgehammer like it’s the fucking hallway scene in Oldboy. There is also a death involving a Christmas star that may tie the chimney scene as the most creative kill of 2022.
There is a segment of the movie that’s particularly notable because it could be an entire movie unto itself. The majority of the film is essentially Die Hard, but, for a brilliant 20 minutes or so, it becomes Home Alone. The little girl in the film just watched Home Alone for the first time and loved it. When she escapes to the attic, she takes inspiration from Kevin McCallister and set up traps directly from that movie. However, this being an R-rated movie, the traps do what they would actually do in real life and fuck these people up. This is a brilliant play on an obvious point that’s be belabored for years: the Home Alone traps wouldn’t result in goofy fun, they would result in horrific injuries. I sat there thinking that Violent Night somehow came up with riffs on two Christmas classics that are so obvious that they are borderline genius and this take on Home Alone deserves to be its own film.
On the downside, most of the characters aren’t particularly interesting outside of Santa and the little girl. The leaders of the gang and the family (played, respectively, by John Leguizamo and Beverly D’Angelo) do have some character moments and decent lines, but the rest of them are generic henchmen and rich assholes that amount to little more than cannon fodder. The family is boring despite the writers trying a bit too hard to make them over-the-top and the dynamic never amounts to anything interesting. It seemed like they were going for a family dynamic similar to the family in Krampus, but the characters in that film were more endearing because they were given actual arcs; these people are just assholes and they stay that way. It’s been a great few weeks for John Leguizamo, though, between this and The Menu. I didn’t care much for him in the 90s and found his comedic work to be obnoxious, but this older and more reserved version of him is actually quite welcome.
Violent Night is a movie that I could see myself watching every couple of years at Christmas. It isn’t an outright classic and it does require a certain mood for full enjoyment, but I would put it on the occasional-viewing shelf with movies like Bad Santa and Christmas Evil as a solid alternative-viewing option for the holidays when I’m half in the bag and I just can’t take another viewing of A Christmas Story. Actually, given that description, I may end up watching this every year.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violent_Night#/media/File:Violent_Night.png
