Violent Night movie review and movie summary (2022) | Roger Ebert (2024)

One of the funniest jokes from "Gescroogd”, the sometimes uneven but vastly underrated 1988Bill Murrayriff op Charles Dickens'A Christmas carol, came right at the beginning with an artificial promotional trailer. Titled 'The Night the Reindeer Died' it was a hilariously cheesy bit of holiday carnage in which terrorists try to conquer the North Pole untilLee Majorssaves the day by shooting the attackers, while the man in the red suit assures him that he is a good boy this year. As a distillation of the craven lengths network TV programmers go to to attract viewers during the Christmas season – in this case by creating a custom television recording of the typicalChuck Norrisvehicle of the day and roughly slapped a thick seasonal glaze on the point - it was admittedly a premise of one joke. But it happened to be a pretty funny joke, and since it only lasted about two minutes, it was over before it started to wear out its welcome.

Now comes “Violent Night,” a film that seems to have been designed by writersPat CaseyInJos Molenaaras directorTommy Wirkolato answer the question of what a full version of "The Night the Reindeer Died" might have looked like, enhanced by an over-the-top carnage that would have been unthinkable on television at the time. The result, perhaps unsurprisingly, is a largely dull cinematic lump of coal that vainly attempts to stretch its one-joke premise into 101 minutes in a tonally uneven attempt to position itself as a new alternative holiday classic. Instead, "Violent Night" is about as entertaining as listening to people debate whether "Die hard"is a Christmas movie or not (it's not, FYI), while a genuinely committed performance is more or less wastedDavid Havenlike the Man in Red himself.

As the film opens, the extremely wealthy, powerful, and dysfunctional Lightstone family is gathered on matriarch Gertrude's vast compound.Beverly D'Angelo) to celebrate the holiday, to use the term promiscuous. While her horrible daughter Alva (Edi Patterson), her equally hateful son Bertrude (Alexander Elliot) – not a typo – and her idiot actor boyfriend (reus cam) clearly asks her favor and her son Jason (Alex Hassel) and his estranged wife Linda (Alexis louder) try to solve their problems, only for Jason's adorable mop daughter Trudy (Lea Brady) still seems willing to embrace the holiday spirit. But it's not long before the family backstabbing is replaced by gunfire as a group of violent thieves led by a man nicknamed Scrooge (Johannes Leguizamo) arrive to steal $300 million, which they believe has been maliciously acquired by Gertrude and stashed in a theoretically impenetrable vault.

While all this is going on, Santa Claus – shown here as full of equal parts booze and self-loathing and contemplating wrapping up his holiday duties for good after one last run – happens to be in the house and ends up locked inside when his reindeer start to run. during the initial chaos. Although his first instinct is to flee, he realizes that Trudy is one of the stars on his beautiful list. He decides to team up and save her using the brutal violence skills he developed in his pre-Santa days, leading to several scenes where he gruesomely dispatches the various villains using everything from a sledgehammer to a snowdrift to a poinsettia stuck in someone's eyeball. . Trudy, for her part, uses her trap-building skills, which she developed by watching "Home alone“to fend off the attackers in equally gruesome ways.

“Violent Night” consists mainly of bits and pieces borrowed from other recent holiday films. Most obviously, it's a kind of hybrid of the aforementioned "Die Hard" and "Home Alone." The drunk, sloppy and cynical version of Santa Claus depicted here, who we see throw a projectile at an unfortunate victim as he flies away in his sleigh during the opening pre-credits scene, will no doubt bring back memories ofBilly Bob Thorntoni "Bad Sinterklaas."The Dysfunctional Family Reunion Interrupted by Criminals Comes Straight Out"Ref." D'Angelo's presence serves as a vivid reminder of "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, "though her role is a 180-degree turn from the warm and loving mother she played there. Even the conceit of Santa Claus fighting bad guys in bloody fashion was done a few years ago in the weird project"Fat man”, in which Mel Gibson's version of Santa battles a hit man hired by a monstrous entitled brat who objected to receiving a lump of coal.

The problem with "Violent Night" isn't its unoriginal premise, but that little is done with it. Santa Claus violently dispatching villains is a one-joke premise that could have been developed into something interesting, perhaps using gruesome physical violence as a way to comment on the emotional cruelty that holiday classics love.A Christmas carol"In"It's a beautiful lifeInstead, Wirkola is content with the same joke about Santa Claus killing bad guys in grotesque ways (and this is an undeniably hard-R movie), which quickly becomes tiresome. Even that might have worked on a basic level as a bloody black comedy, but then the film miserably tries near the end by asking us to care about the fate of the most hateful family members. “Violent Night” also seems oddly reluctant to fully exploit the idea that it's Santa Claus doing the handing out. violence – there is only one point at which he uses his unique powers to their full potential against one of the attackers, and perhaps inevitably this is the one murder that sticks in his memory in retrospect.

The only saving grace of "Violent Night" is Harbor's performance. Like the rest of the film, his character is essentially a joke, but one that he impressively keeps throughout, whether he's ripping off the new additions to his naughty list or communicating with Trudy via walkie-talkies. Granted, he may not replace Edmund Gwenn as the ideal movie Santa anytime soon, but his work here is that one sweet plum in the middle of an otherwise raunchy cinematic pudding.

Now playing in theaters.