John Woo\u2019s new film is\u00a0a\u00a0revenge thriller with such a predictable plot\u00a0that one can imagine the first multicellular organisms distributing an electrochemical\u00a0version of it to each other through osmosis. It’s also one of Woo’s best, and one of the most deliriously cinematic\u00a0movies of the year. If ever there were a movie that demonstrated the idea that the telling matters more than the tale, it’s this one.<\/p>\n
The movie is called “Silent Night,” and it’s set at Christmas, which is when the main couple (Joel Kinnaman and Catalina Sandino Moreno) lose their only son to a stray bullet after a couple of cars full of rival gang members drive through their neighborhood while shooting at each other.\u00a0But the movie’s title is unrelated to the same-named holiday carol. It’s called “Silent Night” because it’s a silent movie with sound.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Nobody\u00a0speaks a full word\u00a0of written\u00a0dialogue. Characters grunt when they crash against a wall, get punched in the gut, or are struck by a car. They\u00a0gasp or scream\u00a0when they’re shot or tortured. You\u00a0hear sound effects and soundscape noises throughout,\u00a0such as wind, rain, footsteps, and traffic. There are pop songs with lyrics on the soundtrack, interspersed with long stretches of Marco Beltrami’s deeply felt, unabashedly melodramatic\u00a0score.\u00a0But nobody\u00a0talks<\/em>, as a regular person would. They exchange looks. Or, if they’re alone and contemplating something tragic or troubling, they’ll stare into space or down at their hands, lost in thought.\u00a0<\/p>\n Not that they do this sort of thing\u00a0constantly, mind you. Much of the time, they’re trying to kill each other, using\u00a0guns, fists, feet,\u00a0knives, explosives, cars, motorcycles, and everyday\u00a0household objects. Or they’re conducting surveillance, drawing up plans, hardening their bodies, practicing lethal skills, and so on, because that’s the kind of movie this is: the kind where people let their actions do the talking.<\/p>\n I suspect people who don’t like the movie will say it is\u00a0unrealistic or that its existence requires such continuous\u00a0maintenance on the filmmakers’ part that the result is more\u00a0distracting or alienating than engrossing. I\u00a0have nothing to say to such people other than, “This movie is not for you.”\u00a0The film’s\u00a0\u00a0dedication to its concept is the origin point for everything unique about it. The result of its\u00a0thoroughness is an exercise in pure filmmaking. Picture plus sound plus music plus performance. The stuff that cinema is supposed to be made of.<\/p>\n To that end, “Silent Night”\u00a0pays tribute to one of Woo’s greatest influences, operatic western director\u00a0extraordinaire Sergio Leone, while pushing the master’s aesthetic further than Leone\u00a0ever did. The film is sort of\u00a0an inverted opera. Or a ballet with violence and intimations of violence in place of dance.\u00a0The performers don’t speak, much less sing. But their faces and bodies do. The purity of emotion they communicate is disarming, unique, and\u2014if you surrender\u00a0to the exercise\u2014unexpectedly moving.\u00a0<\/p>\n What is the story?\u00a0As I said, there isn’t much to describe in terms of events, and there are no subversions, critiques, or out-of-nowhere twists awaiting you\u00a0further down the road.\u00a0Somebody kills a kid. The kid’s parents’ marriage breaks apart because the\u00a0mom, Saya,\u00a0wants to process her grief and move on, while the dad, Brian,\u00a0becomes obsessed with transforming himself into a one-man army and avenging his son’s death exactly one year later. He trains and trains and trains some more. He teaches himself how to knife-fight by watching a video, hardens his physique with calisthenics and weights, and learns to shoot like Dirty Harry and\u00a0drive like Jason\u00a0Statham.<\/p>\n He also\u00a0conducts surveillance on the gang leader responsible for the tragedy, Playa (Harold Torres), who has sold himself as a folk hero to some in the neighborhood, much like\u00a0the gangsters played by James Cagney in crime thrillers from the 1930s and ’40s. Brian delivers the dossier to the police department, where only one detective, Scott Mescudi’s Detective Vassel, cares even a little bit. Does Brian want help?\u00a0Not really. Mostly, he seems to want to prove that the guy he’s about to murder deserves to die.<\/p>\n The rest\u00a0is in the details. The presentation. The action.<\/p>\n Screenwriter Robert Archer Lynn deserves credit for presenting this material in a way that drew Woo’s attention and captured it to the point where Woo got “Silent Night” funded and turned it into\u00a0his first English-language film in twenty years. But I would tend to think the writer would\u00a0agree that there’s nothing fresh here\u00a0in terms of narrative, except perhaps for\u00a0the way the script\u00a0roots\u00a0the main couple, their fellow citizens, the police, and the local criminal gangs in the mundane\u00a0details of ordinary life, even as it conjures a sort of Neo-film-noir or adult comic book universe around them\u2014the kind where a bad guy and his gang live in a Batman villain-looking\u00a0factory\u00a0tower with a giant\u00a0neon sign, packaging their drugs and counting their money and injecting heroin into young women’s arms, and where the\u00a0gang and their rivals can shoot at each other with automatic weapons while drag-racing.<\/p>\n From the very 1980s racial coding (the bad guys are tattooed Latins, the detective a straight-arrow Black man, and the vigilante an aggrieved white dude) to the ludicrous maximus<\/em>\u00a0car-chases-with-shootouts, “Silent Night”\u00a0sometimes feels like a turbocharged cousin of\u00a0a decadent “Death Wish” sequel like “The Crackdown.”\u00a0Other\u00a0touches channel R-rated comic book flicks like “Sin City” and superhero-adjacent crime thrillers like the John Wick movies and “Nobody”\u00a0(both of which would not exist without Woo). The actors all seem determined to play the absolute best version of the hokey\u00a0part they’ve been handed, whether it’s Moreno etching the standard-issue fed-up wife until it becomes\u00a0a\u00a0portrait in grief or\u00a0Torres carrying on as if he’s been cast as Nino Brown in a modern dance adaptation of “New Jack City,” glowering his way through entire set-pieces.\u00a0<\/p>\n Woo has always had a knack for choreographed bloodletting and destruction, but while it would be wrong\u00a0to claim he’s going for subtlety here, there’s something more focused and intimate about how he stages it all. It’s John Woo unplugged. Individual shots are stunning not because they seem huge and expensive and complicated but because of how they’re set up and executed and the amount of time they’re put onscreen (always just the right amount, somehow!) as well as for the cinematic equivalent of what a painter would term “the brushwork.” The latter is particularly striking in the many God’s-eye-view images that follow cars and people through the city and show violence as a work-in-progress (like the shot of the black tar arcs left on the sidewalk of a truck depot where Brian works on his precision driving); or as an event that abruptly concluded and left a\u00a0mark on the universe (such as an overhead tableau of\u00a0Brian and one of his just-vanquished adversaries in a wrecked\u00a0kitchen).\u00a0<\/p>\n The cast appears\u00a0to have trusted Woo and jacked\u00a0into his\u00a0wavelength. Moreno and Kinnaman seem to be pulling things out of their guts that they didn’t realize were\u00a0in there. Some of the shots of characters grieving are difficult to watch because the performers are emotionally naked, not protecting themselves. When grief gives way to fear or\u00a0rage, the effect is volcanic.\u00a0Combine the actors’\u00a0efforts\u00a0with Beltrami’s score, which runs through probably eighty percent of the running time, and Woo’s conductor’s-baton pacing,\u00a0and you’re looking at a\u00a0river of feeling that never stops flowing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" John Woo\u2019s new film is\u00a0a\u00a0revenge thriller with such a predictable plot\u00a0that one can imagine the first multicellular organisms distributing an electrochemical\u00a0version of it to each other through osmosis. It’s also one of Woo’s best, and one of the most deliriously cinematic\u00a0movies of the year. If ever there were a movie that demonstrated the idea that …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[36,50,37],"class_list":["post-1239","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-action-movies","tag-action","tag-crime","tag-thriller"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1239","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1239"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1239\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}