Violent Night Review

Out of all the Stranger Things cast members to funnel their way down the chimney around the Christmas holidays, David Harbour is probably the worst of all. He does shuffle his way out and about in Violent Night, a sack full of unsold Hellboy DVDs presumably stuffing the bag full. He issues those out as though desperately trying to pass on the sin of poor adaptations. His roles since then have been nothing short of meandering – Violent Night is sadly no different for the heroic cop found in the Netflix original. Santa Claus taking on terrorists. Bad Santa and Die Hard come together in a vague comparison which settles itself almost immediately in the new desires of modernity. Carve the recency, and bring about love for the newest item while also throwing vomit jokes in. What a life.  

It will be a violent night with jokes as cheap as this. Cheap American comedy goes down as well as the boxed mulled wine left to ferment out of the fridge. It may be Christmas but the time of goodwill is yanked out and put on a shoestring budget. Ringing and dinging with the chimes of the festive season but giving it an objectively putrid look – as though there were not enough commentaries on that at this time of year already. It strikes as an awkward and apt comparison all at once, though Harbour is not the man to lead this cast. Idyllic living in the gated community usurped by those struggling to bring Christmas cheer to themselves and their loved ones. A few manic neighbours here or there and this is just Christmas With the Kranks.  

With the comedy out of action and cropping up occasionally to ruin the mood, it is up to the defunct action set pieces and stylish camerawork from Tommy Wirkola to hold firm. The Dead Snow director has not matured his comedy in over a decade though his camera movements and eye for detail, the setup for well-timed and future-proof payoffs a nice touch. John Leguizamo is a neat addition to the cast but is, like the rest of the cast, turned into a pantomime equivalent to sell the cliché-clad family turns. Rich and ditzy, poor and earnest. The binary opposites throughout are a dud display and despite the gory kills throughout this, there are remnants of the Black Christmas spiralling throughout this. Neither interesting nor intense despite the desperate attempts to conjure some villainy from almost everyone. 

Harbour may be throwing hands and dropping men onto icicles, but he is stilted by poor-quality comedy and the Bad Santa aesthetic. Drunken Santa is no real trick of the hat and seeing montage shots of Santa drinking from cans and struggling to keep his booze down is not as interesting as Wirkola expects it to be. Cash, video games and more cash are all we want. Is this such a bad thing? Does it take away the Christmas cheer to fend off against the cost of living? Who knows. Violent Night knows nothing, especially not on what it wants to commentate on, and how invested it wants to get in its divorced family dynamic. Sometimes the wishes of a child to get their parents back together is a daft one – the lack of responsibilities and imperfections between the sadly divorced couple at the heart of this is as much of a casualty as the violent mercenaries rushing through a house to take out wealthy dullards.