The Pitch: It’s Christmas Eve, and Santa Claus (David Harbour) is having a rough time of it — while he’s got plenty of Christmas magic to power his sleigh, otherwise he’s mostly relying on booze to get him through the tedium of delivering video games to the children of the world.
But things change when he stumbles across a very bad situation: An insanely wealthy family, holed up at matriarch Gertrude Lightstone (Beverly D’Angelo)’s compound for the holiday, has been taken hostage by a ruthless group of thieves led by “Mr. Scrooge” (John Leguizamo). And it turns out that Santa’s bag of tricks also includes his memories of a life before his current job, when the red he wore came from blood spilled in battle…
What’s Nice: Rarely has it been so easy to write a plot summary as it was to write the one above. The absolute best thing about Violent Night, which nimbly joins the ranks of “naughty but nice” Christmas movies like Bad Santa and The Ref, is that it knows exactly what it’s putting in the audience’s stocking: Home Alone, Die Hard, and The Northman, buzzing together in a blender of ultra-violence.
This means that you’ve got Harbour leaning hard into his natural gruffness as a Santa burnt out on centuries of his routine, and Leguizamo paying proper homage to Alan Rickman’s love of scenery-noshing, all while bullets fire and carnage ensues. This all comes courtesy of director Tommy Wirkola (Dead Snow, Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters) and screenwriters Pat Casey and Worm Miller (the Sonic the Hedgehog movies), who never lose sight of a core aspect of the film’s premise: That this is the real Santa Claus, and despite his frustrations with the modern world, he’s still got that magic.
How that magic works in service to the bloodletting is just one of the fun surprises in store; Wirkola’s previous genre mash-ups have always had a strong visual flair on top of an innate glee in playing with tropes, and Violent Night might be him at the peak of his powers.
Violent Night (Universal)
What’s Naughty: While the best thing about this movie is its clarity of intent, the worst thing about it is that it uses blunt force to call out its reference points, name-checking both Die Hard and Home Alone repeatedly.
The invocation of the latter is actually fun at points, as it allows the film to acknowledge one of the dark truths behind Chris Columbus’s blockbuster holiday franchise: In the real world, Kevin McCallister would have murdered the Wet Bandits with his “defenses.” But the film’s working a little too hard to inspire those comparisons, and plays better when not leaning into its more post-modern quirks.
Along those lines, while “Scrooge”‘s gang of thieves is an appropriately mixed-up bunch, the Lightstone family is drawn a bit paper-thin, with only one or two truly likable characters in the mix. This is only a problem when the film’s emotional beats rely on caring whether the hostages live or die — fortunately, that’s not too often, as the film’s emphasis is far more on
(That said, Edi Patterson of The Righteous Gemstones brings a delicious edge to her role as the more obnoxious of the two Lightstone siblings, while Leah Brady, as the young girl who might be the one member of the family worth saving, manages to hit the right notes of precocious without being cloying.)
The Verdict: A movie like Violent Night is perfect for the theater experience (especially if you luck into having one audience member who showed up unprepared for the mayhem, and can be heard slowly losing her mind as the film progresses). But at a certain point, as the action gets more and more over the top, it all comes down to whether or not the film can nail that big final moment — deliver a resolution that surpasses all of the wild shenanigans that have built up to the ultimate climax.
To overhype these things is to potentially ruin their power, but Violent Night does figure out a way to top itself, when the time comes. And given all the madness that’s ensued prior to that point, it’s a real accomplishment. If Violent Night had one goal — to be a Christmas movie for adults pumping with bloodlust after surviving the shopping mall parking lot — then it succeeded. It won’t be shocking, to find that it’s become a staple of the season in years to come. (Though hopefully the adults wait until the kids go to bed, to watch.)
Where to Watch: Violent Night arrives in theaters on Friday, December 2nd.
Trailer:
