Hong Kong director John Woo decided to jump into the Hollywood world back in 1993. His first major Hollywood studio film was Hard Target. He realized right away that Hollywood is way different than Hong Kong. First, he didn’t know about the rating system that we have here, and he had to deal with a leading man who’s an egomaniac. Studio executives didn’t think Woo could handle the Hollywood crew, including his leading man and they hired Sam Raimi to supervise the production. While Hard Target wasn’t the big hit that the studio folks thought it was going to be, Woo’s later films including Broken Arrow, FACE/OFF, and Mission Impossible 2 were huge box office hits.

With a lot of clout behind him in La La Land, Woo decided to flex his muscles and made a big-budget war film that became one of the biggest flops in the early 2000s in Windtalkers. He followed that up with another flop, Paycheck. He had some other high-profile projects lined up in the early 2000s, including the adaptation of Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six and a video game-based film that I couldn’t recall. It was supposed to be The Rock’s first massive-budget film at the time. But with two box office flops back-to-back, Woo couldn’t get those projects off the ground. He went back to China and made some films over there. Now after a 20-year break from Hollywood, he’s back with a new film, Silent Night.

Brian (Joel Kinnaman) is an average man trying to support his family, including his wife, Saya (Catalina Sandino Moreno), and his seven-year-old son, Taylor (Alex Briseno). On Christmas Day, Taylor is killed in the crossfire from shootouts between rival gangs, and Brian is left with a bullet in his throat after chasing Playa (Harold Torres), the leader of the GI-7 gang. Emerging from the hospital weeks later, Brian is no longer able to speak, and he turned to alcohol to calm his anger because he’s so depressed about losing his child. Because of this, his marriage to Saya fell apart and he’s all alone. Detective Vassel (Scott Mescudi aka Kid Cudi) is on the case, but he can’t do much in Los Angeles, with vicious crime an hourly occurrence. Recognizing there’s no help coming, Brian decided to build himself into a fighting machine, researching Playa’s criminal activities, making a Christmas Eve plan to storm into the gang’s compound and kill everyone he could.

So, the script by Robert Archer Lynn is nothing new. It’s basically another Death Wish clone. It’s about a regular guy who turned into a vigilante after losing a loved one. But the hook here is that the film doesn’t have any dialog. Which I found weird since people in the story someone won’t talk to one another. To indicate any type of communication, people just texted one another. Which of course, is what we do now in our ever-connected world. But we do talk to one another when we’re in the same spot. But to see characters just mumble or don’t even talk just didn’t work. One thing that worked for me was that Brian is not a superhuman, he stumbled on his first kill, and he almost got himself killed during his hunt for the gang members. But of course, this is an action film, so he’s able to mow down the baddies with no issues later in the story.

Woo included his signature slow-mo shots and double-gun shootouts. He didn’t try anything new when it comes to style, so fans of his work will be happy to see what he created. But this was not a big-budget production, so he’s limited to only a couple of big shootout sequences.

This is Kinnaman’s show and he’s in every scene. With his 6’2 muscular frame, he’s always been a believable action star. While performing without any dialog, Kinnaman was able to convey his emotion with facial expression and physical endurance. Other actors in the film were just filler, including the one-dimensional villain Playa.

While this wasn’t an impressive come-back for Woo that I had hoped, it’s still nice to see he’s working in this part of the world again. I know he’s been trying to get the remake of his Hong Kong hit film The Killer off the ground for the last few years. His plan was going to make it with a female lead but so far, the project has stalled. Last I heard, he had a conversation with Ben Affleck about the project. Maybe we’ll get to see the remake with Affleck facing off against his buddy Matt Damon? We’ll have to wait and see.

So have you seen SILENT NIGHT? Well, what do you think?

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