Oh the weather outside is frightful, but the fire is so delightful. Since we’ve no place to go, let us go to the theaters and spend time watching Violent Night. Whenever a Christmas movie is coming to town, there’s always some level of enticement to see it with the whole family, and over the last 5-7 years we’ve seen a small dose of Christmas movies that range from various degrees. Krampus, the recent Apple TV+ musical comedy in Spirited or even the wildly popular animated Netflix film Klaus are recent examples of the perfect to watch around the holiday season. Of course, there’s the more classical and old school side of Christmas movies that include Miracle on 34th Street, Home Alone, Elf and perhaps the greatest one of them all, It’s a Wonderful Life. We’ve all got our great Christmas picks and for the most part there’s no wrong choice (except The Polar Express, Ron Howard’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas and Die Hard).
We had hard about the project Violent Night going all the way back in 2020 when it first announced with David Harbour attached to play Jolly Old Saint Nicholas. The buzz started to pick up even more when the film debuted at this year’s New York Comic Con and all the praise was going to David Harbour. With the marketing banking on the festivities of Christmas and the likability of David Harbour, Violent Night might have become an ultimate Christmas classic.It’s Home Alone but with the style of action like a John Wick movie and it blends together in great Christmas fashion. It’s wild, FUNNY, super violent and David Harbour provides one of the best on screen Santa’s in quite some time. Aside from its predictability and some weak supporting characters, Violent Night serves itself as the perfect type of Christmas movie to watch every single holiday.
While doing his job like he does every year, Santa (David Harbour) stumbles upon a particular house where a group of mercenaries, lead by a man named Scrooge (John Leguizamo), attack the estate of a wealthy family. When Santa realizes what’s at stake this family that’s held hostage, it’s up to him to save them and Christmas.
Aside from the superb action, the best aspect of this movie is David Harbour’s performance as Santa. We all fell in love with him with his role from Stranger Things and while the movie wasn’t great he was certainly a good choice for the Hellboy reboot back in 2019. This is the best he’s ever been. He plays Santa as drunken, middle aged and rusty man, yet is given an incredible backstory with a very interesting taste of mythology that’s teased throughout the film. While David Harbour isn’t the fittest of the fits, he’s still a big and hulking actor and he perfectly embodies the perfect physique of a modern day Santa Clause. Having the producers of John Wick and Nobody attached to this make it not just a great seasonal movie, but a terrific action movie overall. The action in this movie kicks serious ass because of how creative and inventive it feels. Each particular action sequence is orchestrated so well and it only works so well because of the type of creators that made them come to life.
No movie is perfect and neither is Violent Night. The main two issues with the movie is it’s story structure and several key supporting players. As stated earlier, this is a very predictable movie. It never took away from any enjoyment from the experience, but the flow of the story and even character moments are very familiar in any action movies you’ve seen in the past. The other issue really comes down to John Leguizamo’s character and several other ones. It was, however, very creative to give some of the villainous mercenaries classic Christmas names. Nevertheless, this might have been a script issue but some of the supporting characters were maybe written to be generically. For John Leguizamo as the villain, you’re looking for a more intimidating bad guy, and no disrespect to John Leguizamo as a performer, but he never came across as a scary mercenary.
At the end of the day, Violent Night is exactly what it was meant to be and it has now perfectly set itself up to be rewatched every Christmas. One final positive that needs to be addressed is the film’s score composed by Dominic Lewis. It’s riffing on classical Christmas music that people will instantly recognize but with an edgier and more action infused twist. David Habour absolutely KIILS it in this, the action is exciting and he even shares a sweet and lovable dynamic with the little girl of the family. Suffice to say, this will be a staple for Christmas movie watching.
Final grade for Violent Night: B+
Zane's take at the Cinema's 