Review of 'Violent Night': David Harbor stars in your simple, everyday heist combined with bloody action Santa Claus meets 'Home Alone' Christmas thriller (2024)

The now age-old joke about the types of pitches movie executives respond to ("It's 'Avengers 2'... meets 'Glass Onion'!") is actually about what audiences respond to.We arethose who love our special sauce tacos stuffed into a bacon burger topped with a pizza roll. And "Violent night' is a film that takes the audience's oversized appetite very seriously. The title might remind you of a holiday horror movie, with Santa Claus as a crazy slasher, but you know, we've been there and eaten that. In "Violent Night"David Haven, the jovially quirky actor from "Stranger Things" and the 2019 reboot of "Hellboy," actually plays a deranged Santa Claus who sails through Christmas on a pile of Christmas cookies and random alcohol, peeing and vomiting his way out the side of his sleigh rides - but we've also tasted that fast food combination in movies like "Bad Santa."

To wake up the jaded taste buds of today's moviegoers, you need a piece of entertainment that really wants to happenunitetaste. Think about this: a comedy about a filthy rich family whose members can't stand each other, yet gather on Christmas Eve at Greenwich, Conn., the country home of their misanthropic matriarch, Gertrude Lightstone (Beverly D'Angelo), for a a bit of forced holiday fun. Before the festivities even begin, they are ambushed by a ruthless team of home invaders led by a psychopath who calls himself Scrooge (John Leguizamo). He sets the tone with a hearty “Bah humbug, dammit!”, and the booming Christmas spirits escalate from there.

Scrooge, who has been running the joint for months, knows that $300 million is hidden in the vault beneath it, and he has arranged for everyone – catering staff, security guards – to secretly work for him. What he didn't count on was Santa making his annual Christmas pit stop. Santa Claus himself is a bit of a Scrooge: a drunk and a slob who can't get over what consumer zombies today's children have become. But he also has special powers. Do I mean his ability to slide up and down the chimneys with the blink of his nose? Or the golden digital scrolls that he unfolds and lists what each child has done, naughty or nice? Certainly all that.

But mostly this Santa Claus is a tough guy with guns. He's many centuries old and started out in vintage Kris Kringle fashion as some kind of down-to-earth Scandinavian Viking warrior. Now he's like a member of the Expendables, dispatching enemies with old-fashioned brutality. When he grabs a sledgehammer, he becomes a death wish version of Thor. But since "Violent Night" is a Christmas movie, it's all in good fun! Especially when Trudy (Leah Brady), the 7-year-old daughter of Jason (Alex Hassell), the only honorable member of the Lightstone clan, goes "Home Alone" medieval on the home invaders' ass. Ladders are fixed so that the neck is pierced with nails; heads are scalped; the pain is brought. As someone in a movie like this might say:That's what I'm talking about. Or maybe I should just say, have a damn little gonzo thing for Christmas.

Over the past week, everyone in the entertainment media, including myself, has been writing handwritten articles about how the award-winning films all flopped at the box office. One after another, “Tár,” “The Banshees of Inisherin,” “She Said,” “Triangle of Sadness” and “Till” all crawl their way to gross perhaps $10 million. (“The Fabelmans,” with a more high-profile pedigree, will likely crawl their way to $20 million.) We know this is the age of Marvel, so “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” is the triumphant counterexample. But even in 2022, people don't do thatjust nowgo see Marvel movies. One of the things that has defeated adult films is the insatiable appetite for shameless junk food like "Violent Night." The film has no cartoon hook; it's a genre buffet where you destroy a dozen things you've seen before. Butit isthe hook. “Violent Night” is entertaining in a few places, tired in more than a few others, but complaining about it the way I do makes me sound grumpy. It's a film that feeds the beast.

David Harbor reveals a hint of sympathy, and that makes him the right actor to play a down-and-out, revenge-is-my-Santa Claus who really, beneath his bloody, stained gray curls, is the Santa Claus we wants us. to be him. John Leguizamo, as always, refuses to dial anything in; as Scrooge, the sociopath who hates Christmas, he makes every obscenity pop. Beverly D'Angelo, Edi Patterson and Cam Gigandet play the rest of the Lightstone clan as wandering high camp horrors, and Alexis Louder, as Jason's estranged wife, brings a lonely note of stubborn common sense to the proceedings. “Violent Night,” with its action-thriller soundtrack built around themes from classic Christmas carols, is a film that makes you think: What's next, “Massacre on 34th St.”? Christmas movies, like all Hollywood pulp, build on each other, and maybe this is just another holiday hodgepodge from an era of nothing, but "Violent Night," depending on how it performs, could open the door to a new kind of movies. of a down-and-dirty Christmas/action hybrid. Imagine hearing lines like“God bless us all, dammit!”The possibilities are endless.