John Woo’s latest is as violent and merciless a revenge thriller as you can imagine.
It’s a widely-held proposition that great artists mellow as they age. That hasn’t held true in filmmaking. Robert Bresson ended his career in his 80s with two of his most fevered and angry works, “The Devil Probably” and “L’’Argent.” Martin Scorsese, now 81, put out the tortured and indignant “Killers of the Flower Moon” this year. And now the inspired action filmmaker, John Woo, 77, delivers the merciless revenge shoot-em-up, “Silent Night.”
Woo’s pictures have always operated on the “pure cinema” principle. Simply put, he prefers showing to telling. And what he shows are emotional extremes and their violent fallout. For this picture he put his prodigious staging, shooting and cutting skills to a test that won’t surprise his fans: The movie is practically free of dialogue. Joel Kinnaman plays Brian, a father living near California gang turf, driven mad by grief after seeing his young child killed by a stray bullet fired during a battle. In his initial maniacal reaction, he’s shot in the throat by a drug dealer with slashes of black tattooed on one side of his face.
The attack happens around Christmas, and once Brian emerges from a monthslong drinking binge, he shapes up, takes up arms, and marks the next Christmas on his calendar: “Kill them all.” And so it goes. Car chases, motorcycle chases, stabbings, shootings, bone-breaking. Even without the talking (Catarina Sandino Moreno, as Brian’s beleaguered wife, mutters “OK” once or twice), there’s a lot of sound and fury and it works: This is suspenseful and cathartic, and even the schmaltzy stuff is so distinctly John Woo that it’s welcome.
Silent Night
Rated R for, well, violence. No language, though! Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
