John Woo's action satire Silent Night (2023) is a dog

This is an almost dialogless film about a father trying to avenge his son's death on Christmas Eve on the Christmas Eve of the following year.  This is an over the top, overly melodramatic to a ridiculous degree look at what might happen if a regular guy went out for revenge.

Not to mince words, John Woo's latest is an action movie satire and it is really bad. It's bad from the first frames as Joel Kinnaman is seen running in close up slow motion in a blood soaked sweater after the gang bangers who shot his son- except its clear he is running in place because the background never changes position.

Sending up all his cliches in the worst possible way, Woo has SILENT NIGHT play out  like some lesser talent was trying to make a spoof of a John Woo film but fell on their face. Yes, the film is funny, but for all the wrong reasons. We laugh at the film not with it.

Even worse is the fact that most of it is horribly dull with nothing compelling happening after the opening shoot out  until the one hour mark. After that it's just over the top nonsense and riffs on Woo tropes. Actually after the opening it's a silly recovery, a flashback to the  kid's death and silly training for 50 minutes of screen time before a brief fight, then another dead quarter hour before the action starts for real.It's painful. 

What happened to Woo's sense of pacing? He made the 5 hour masterpiece RED CLIFF and the almost as long THE CROSSING, and they never felt as long as this hour and forty five minute stinker.

Joel Kinnaman is awful. His whole performance is just mugging for the camera. He is so bad that it could be one of the worst performances in action film history. This is the kind of performance that I've seen kill a career. I find it odd since he was so good in other action roles (Rick Flagg in Suicide Squad and Robocop). The  creme de la creme  of his badness are his frequent sequences where he is missing his dead son showing us a mushy doe eyed fake sadness. The performance had me going WTF out loud  repeatedly.

I'm at a loss as to what Woo was doing with this film. I've never seen him make this many bad choices. I understand why our hero never speaks, he was shot in the throat, but the fact we only hear two whispered lines from his wife and radio broadcasts makes little sense. Yes I know it's a conceit but it's a bad one. Also bad is Woo allowing his action director to make almost all the car related sequences play out similarly. 

This film is just a huge misfire. It's such a big one that I don't want to know why Woo made this for the John Wick producers, I just want to flush this film down the toilet and then move on to the next thing. 

To be honest if you come in an hour and three minutes into the film and just watch the last 45 minutes of action you are probably going to like it. Yea, the action sequences have some shitty bits in them, and the melodrama is silly, but it's weirdly compelling, in a crappy action movie sort of a way. (Honestly this film was made for streaming because the film has no dialog you  can actually scan through most of the first hour and not miss anything. If this film develops any positive reputation it's going to be with people who scan through it)

Avoid this film unless you must see John Woo's worst film.