Silent Night (2023)

Silent Hunter

Silent Night
USA/Mexico 2023
Directed by John Woo
A Better Tomorrow Films

Warning: Slight spoilers

Not to be confused with the absolutely brilliant movie Silent Night from 2021 (which I reviewed here), John Woo’s identically titled action movie was something I wanted to see last year but, well, it only got a release via the internet in the UK on 23rd December (by which time I’m too busy) and, frankly, I don’t watch Christmas films out of season. I did, however, manage to snag a signed copy of Marco Beltrami’s brilliant score to the movie when it was released early this year and, what can I say, now that it’s actually December I’ll actually be able to play it too (I don’t listen to Christmas music out of season either, folks).

So this one stars Joel Kinnaman as Brian and the brilliant Catalina Sandino Moreno (from the TV show From) as his wife. The credits roll as we see Brian running in slow motion, his Christmas jumper soaked in blood. As the credits end he catches up with a couple of cars who are shooting it out in a gang battle. When he catches up to them... all I can say is, this is the first Christmas movie I’ve seen where, within five minutes, two people have their heads skewered with forklift truck prongs and the main protagonist has his throat shot out at close range.

A month later, when Brian gets out of hospital, you begin to realise that, apart from diegetic sound from sources such as TV or radio plus a few whispered words here and there, the majority of this film exists with absolutely no dialogue whatsoever... which is just as well considering that the hero no longer has a voice box.

It turns out that the son of Brian and his wife was shot dead from a stray bullet in that gangland battle at the start of the picture and, after he spends a month or so trying to drink his pain away and his wife leaves him, he starts training for revenge... physically, with firearms, with a car, with knives etc, so that he can, as he scrawls on the calendar for December 24th of the current year he’s in (2022 it turns out)... Kill Them All.

That’s the plot, It’s simple and there’s a lot of tension and build up before the first, brutal, hand to hand combat scene used as a prelude to an ultra long series of action scenes culminating in the last 25 minutes referencing Bruce Lee’s Game Of Death, in a way, as Brian (and, to a small extent, a policeman played by someone called Kid Cudi) fights his way up to the top of a building block to get to the final villain’s lair.

And it’s nicely shot, has some interesting framing and some nice, slow camera moves and, ultimately, is a pretty solid film. For instance, there’s a lovely moment where the juxtaposition of two shots forming a transition are really poetic... as a falling tear from his wife’s cheek turns ito the ejected shell from a gun range.

Also, I think there’s a big nod to the cinema of Sergio Leone in this... namely the way he references memories with some of the main protagonists in his films. In this case, his dead son’s music box chimes are used to show him both thinking back to his life before the shooting and also as a reminder/focus of his, as the saying goes, roaring rampage of revenge. It very much reminded me of the use of the watch chimes in For A Few Dollars More, for instance. And come to think of it, the silent hero taking silencing damage to the throat could be seen as being influenced by both Charles Bronson’s character in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time In The West and Jean-Louis Trintignant’s title character in Sergio Corbucci’s The Great Silence so... yeah, pretty sure John Woo must be a fan of Italian westerns, for sure.

And, yeah, Beltrami’s score was pretty outstanding in places and certainly supports the movie well (although I found the end credits music a little underwhelming). I’m definitely looking forward to giving this CD a spin or two over the next fortnight, for sure.

And that more or less wraps up this fairly short review of Silent Night so I’ll just add that I could have done without the Hallmark movie moment in the villains lair towards the end of the story (you’ll know it when you see it) and that Brian is, fortunately, not depicted as a complete superman in this... he gets hurt and sometimes only luck saves him from death. And Joel Kinnaman certainly looks like he can do this stuff and does a very convincing job of portraying this guy (perhaps a little less convincing when he puts on a smiling face in the flashbacks but, yeah, these moments are luckily kept to a minimum). Silent Night is definitely one to watch from Woo and maybe I’ll start revisiting his back catalogue at some point and looking at some of his classics on Blu Ray (such as The Killer, Hard Boiled and Paycheck... but not Face Off, that was awful). So, yeah, maybe give this one a go.

Mission Impossible II

Treasure Of The 
Chimera Mardre

Mission Impossible II
2000 USA/Germany
Directed by John Woo
DVD Region 2

Okay, so on to the next review as I watch the Mission Impossible films for the first time, courtesy of my dad (see my review of the first one here).

So four years after DePalma’s first movie hit cinemas, famous Chinese action director John Woo was called in to direct the second in the ongoing series and, as you would expect, delivered a much different film to the first one. I actually remember the trailer which ran for this in cinemas at the time, of Tom Cruise getting all ‘Kirked up’ and climbing a mountain and a nice quote from Anthony Hopkins along the lines of “Mr. Hunt, this isn't mission difficult, it's mission impossible.” I must say, the trailer looked quite good but there was no way I would be going to the cinema to see it because I hadn’t seen the first one. 13 years later... I’ve now fixed that issue.

Now, I’ll be honest with you, I‘ve not seen that much Woo... but I know he makes some of the most respected ‘kinetic action ballet’ style of movies out there. I’d seen only four of his other films before this and I remember three of those - The Killer, Hard Boiled and Paycheck - being pretty good... unfortunately this man also made a terrible movie called Face Off which, to paraphrase a great writer once again, I only managed to survive the tedium of by gnawing one of my own legs off.

He seems to have a couple of trademark features to his films that I can make out... one is a white dove which always seems to get in there somewhere (a little like director John Glen’s pigeon obsession), this film being no exception and the other being that there’s usually a fair amount of slow motion footage during action sequences which, in all honesty, I do find kind of dull. Woo uses these to highlight certain details of a sequence he wants to stick in your mind... much like Eisenstein would take an isolated shot of an individual in close up, isolated away from the crowd he or she is in, to emphasise the emotion or detail of a scene... that is, if Eisenstein had been filming people driving high speed vehicles and shooting about a gazilllion rounds of ammunition a second at each other.

Well there’s plenty of his slow motion stuff in here too... especially in the end fist fight between Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt character and the main villain of the piece, played by Dougray Scott (who I previously saw in the Doctor Who episode Hide, reviewed here...). However, there is one use of slow motion right near the opening of the picture, which introduces Thandie Newton’s “lovable thief” romantic interest character and throws her into the mix of things as Tom Cruise first catches her eye while they are both observing some Spanish flamenco dancing... and the flamenco steps are slowed down. This "dance" of these characters’ opening encounter is something which does catch the imagination somewhat and it’s also something which the director takes great pains to emphasise as an echo within the body of the rest of the movie... and which I think is a good thing because I’m guessing that emphasis wouldn’t eccessarily have been something which was actually written into the script. It’s done almost subliminally during key moments, by the use of Hans Zimmer’s fairly interesting scoring, which every now and again will reference back to that flamenco music to remind us that Cruise and his new leading lady definitely have... “a thing” for each other. And this works really well.

I say it’s a different kind of film from the first one and certainly there’s a lot more sweeping elegance to the shooting style but, although John Woo had the script written around the action scenes he already wanted to include as set pieces (and not the other way around as most traditional directors would do), the film is not exactly an action fest in terms of content and I’m afraid to say that, while I prefer good writing over high speed action pieces any day, this second outing suffers from exactly the same problem tht the first film did. That is to say, the story and events depicted are really obvious and predictable all the way through.

It’s very obvious, given the parameters of the Mission Impossible branding, that various twist scenes are just not going to work. The whole plot being centred around a sample of a deadly virus called Chimera, for example, almost screams out for one of the Mission Impossible team to get infected, causing a 20 hour time limit to that person expiring unless the virus can be obtained. Of course, way before the time this actually happens in the movie, you will have figured out who, how and certainly why this happens... which is a shame because I suspect that could have been rewritten as a really strong and dynamic part of the plot.

Similarly, a good five minutes before we see the leading actor ostensibly shot by one of the bad guys (so “bad” he went on to play Dracula in Stephen Sommer’s Van Helsing), it’s pretty obvious by the way the scene is shot, even before either of the characters are through the door in a particular scene, that Cruise has switched their identity with the aid of the “not very convincing” face masks people use to steal each others personae with in these films.

But, as the first entry in the series, there is some good stuff going on here too, with a great "bath/robbery" scene between Cruise and Newton near the start of the movie and a truly poetic, wire work fist fight at the end which isn’t anything new (even for the time) but is certainly more than watchable, especially when pitched with Zimmer’s effective choral and percussion music which does a lot to elevate a fair few of the action scenes to a certain level of quality... much like Elfman’s did in the first movie although, to be fair to Mr. Elfman and in hindsight, having now heard the music as a stand alone experience, Elfman’s score did suffer a lot more in the mix than Zimmer’s does here, where it gets a fair amount of highlighting against the inevitable bullets, bikes and bangs.

A lot of people have said to me that the second and third movies in the four to date are a lot worse than the original. I don’t think the second movie, at any rate, is any worse than De Palma’s opening salvo... I just think it’s a similar film done differently. So, honestly, if you liked the first one and haven’t seen this one, I’m guessing this will be a far from intolerable experience for you. Check it out sometime.



Mission Impossible at NUTS4R2
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to click on one of the titles below to take you to my review.

Mission Impossible
Mission Impossible 2
Mission Impossible 3
Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol 
Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation 
Mission Impossible: Fallout