In the landscape of contemporary action, all roads lead to John Woo. Woo laid the template for hyperkinetic, romantically guided explosive fervor, wanton violence through a lens of heroic brotherhood and melodramatic bloodshed. Grungy law enforcement embroiled in violent wars with triads and gangsters; stoic, lonely hitmen crawling out of cyclones of flame; the vicious maw of war chewing through mud-coated revolutionaries. Men in search of a better tomorrow. Friendship, betrayal, love, and the tested limits of ideology line the walls of his cinematic endeavors while the interiors flood with face melting action sequences. Beautiful ballets of harmonic kineticism, the heavy smoke of gunpowder a fog of war across his concrete and steel battlefields. Precision tooled choreography moves each object with purpose, chaotic visions of explosive insanity with an eminent coherence to every image, a limitless understanding of space and how each action affects the propulsion of the sequence.
John Woo’s aggressively singular oeuvre of work in Hong Kong is a sparking confluence of place and time, executing his visions in a space where the rules were fast and loose and every working performer was giving their body to the will of action on celluloid – some things cannot (and for the wellbeing of stunt performers, should not) be recreated. These affordances of time and place are shifted further by Woo’s move to Hollywood in the early 90s, but his heightened emotional approach and vision of towering, explosive blockbuster setpieces was not lost in the move. Often overlooked, Woo’s work in America is still some of cinema’s finest action filmmaking, from the dusty bayou bloodshed of Hard Target (1993) to the overcranked stylistic madness of Face/Off (1997) or the feverish globetrotting espionage of Mission: Impossible II (2000). Woo’s Hollywood productions are restrained relative to the woozy, non-stop violence of Hard Boiled (1992) or the viscerally brutal melodramatic spiral of The Killer (1989), but they operate on a different level of heightened stylization, Woo reworking the constraints of system to emerge with whirlwinds of emphatic, balletic action that still echo his familiar thematic flourishes.
Silent Night is no different, an echoing reflection on a storied and stunning filmography that knows exactly how to build its disparate parts into a towering Woo inferno climax. 20 years after his last Hollywood production, Woo returns to drown the dusty haze of Texas heat in crimson melodrama as a spiraling deconstruction of every cinematic trope he once pioneered. Action speaks louder than words, Woo posits; how can the purity of images committed to film serve as an expression of faith in the building blocks of action, but also as a pure indictment of this particular brand of violently heroic idolatry?
On the surface, Joel Kinnaman’s Brian Godlock is another in a long line of gritty vigilantes, tough-as-nails men fueled by revenge and in search of redemption. But instead of forging a hero who executes those who wronged him with stylistic precision, Woo paints a portrait of a pathetic, angry asshole whose inability to come to terms with his grief transforms itself into an ugly, violent demon. Long gone are the days of bloody brotherhood, bonds forged in search of justice, looking for hope in the midst of a grimy underworld populated by the discarded and downtrodden. Now the privileged exercise their right to wanton violence with abandon, law enforcement an equally pathetic and limp nonentity that shrugs at the pain they perpetually fail to protect anyone from.
Godlock is not a hero – in fact, he begins as the opposite of the familiar contemporary John Wick archetype, not a highly proficient killing machine but an ordinary suburban dad who might as well have died the day his son did. At least, what life he has left becomes instantly disposable. What is left to live for? Consumed by his empty hatred and missing his voice after taking a bullet to the throat, everything left in Godlock’s life is discarded and allowed to slip away, seemingly convinced that the only solution to this situation is a nihilistic explosion of violent revenge. Here, Woo constructs his action film piece by piece. The familiar stylistic flourishes of his films ring throughout what amounts to a film as a training montage, a careful and methodical construction of a dizzying Woo setpiece that invokes the ideas and imagery of heroic bloodshed and aggressive rebellion.
Godlock practices, and Woo relishes in each moment he staves off the final collision of all of these disparate particles of violence. His once quaint single family ranch house becomes a dark, brooding home base breeding conspiratorial psychosis. He learns how to fire a gun, training to tear through torsos with full clips of 9mm rage, but his focus is less on the brutal pinpoint efficiency of John Wick and more on how cool John Wick looks doing it, an angry fantasy that spirals beyond any notion of simple revenge. He buys a dusty, off-market Mustang and affixes steel pursuit reinforcements, driving out to rusting, abandoned machine yards to teach himself how to drift around a corner with the effortless charisma of Chow Yun-fat and Tony Leung. He watches self-defense YouTube playlists and builds himself into a lean, muscle-bound bruiser with a leather duster that looked a lot better on Jean-Claude Van Damme.
These invocations of Woo’s vibrantly etched celluloid history do not ring with the same reverence as those in Chad Stahelski’s world of neon assassin bloodshed, here they are biting rejections of Godlock’s inability to redeem himself as a forged in hatred killer. As Woo explodes into the climactic finale he’s been building to for so long, it’s clear his view of what’s to come is more a somber lament of the oncoming deterministic destruction than it is an electric glee in anticipation of cathartic violence. It doesn’t make it any less distinctively Woo’s, of course, but the dizzying finale is tinted with far less triumphant determination as his films are used to, instead replaced by a constant battering of both Godlock’s arrogance and his sculpted physique, constantly being eroded by his own refusal to consider anything outside of himself. He is beaten and bloodied, still a novice despite his training, fumbling his perfect execution at every turn. This still requires the beautiful precision of Woo’s direction, this knowledge of how the specificity of space can be leveraged for maximum bloody tension as he winds up for a woozy, dreamy final setpiece covered in glistening opulence and hallucinogenic mirrors.
Silent Night is a film about death, a constant corroding force that weighs above everyone in its cyclone. Nobody can escape it, none of it benefits anyone, and nobody comes out looking like a hero – another dead body playing out some detestable conservative fantasy or a desiccated corpse with visions of some hatefully forged brotherhood. Now there is no one left. No one to talk to, voices silenced, nothing accomplished. Merry Christmas, America.