‘Violent Night’ Is A Violent Delight

Let’s be honest. When a movie like Violent Night arrives in theaters, odds are you’ve already made up your mind about whether or not to see it by the time the reviews start rolling in. And to be fair, with a title like that, an official summary like this…

…and a trailer that I can only describe as “glorious,” it’s not a hard call to make. Love it or hate it, it’s the sort of thing where you almost immediately know whether or not this movie is for you. With that in mind, let’s just cut to the chase. With Violent Night, director Tommy Wirkola (Dead Snow) simply delivered an absolute blast. The movie is a tightly paced thrill ride that earns every one of its 112 blood-soaked minutes and is sure to join the pantheon of Christmastime classics.

I said earlier that Violent Night has the makings of a Christmas classic, and there’s one perennial favorite, in particular, which comes to mind. While I try to stay away from spoilers in my reviews, I don’t think it’s giving too much away to say that in a lot of ways Violent Night is basically Die Hard. Not in a shot-for-shot remake way (though there are certainly references scattered through the film), but in the sense that a lot of action movies of a certain vintage can be described in shorthand as “Die Hard but…” Speed, for example, is “Die Hard but on a bus,” and Air Force One is “Die Hard but on a plane.” The Die Hard franchise itself isn’t immune to this, with Die Hard 2 being “Die Hard but in an airport.” Even Home Alone can be summed up as “Die Hard but for kids.” Violent Night, then, is “Die Hard but with a drunken, foul-mouthed Santa in place of Bruce Willis.” This has the effect of making the film feel like something of a throwback but in a good way. After all, the “Die Hard but” trend in action movies was a staple of my childhood and that lends the proceedings an air of nostalgia that is right at home in a Christmas movie.

The centerpiece of the film is, of course, David Harbour‘s Santa Claus. And boy, does he deliver. Suffice it to say, Harbour understood the assignment. He brings a sense of weariness to the proceedings that anyone who has seen his early Stranger Things performances (think Season One) will find familiar. Furthering the Die Hard comparison from earlier, Santa is very much a hero in the tradition of John McClane (which is not a sentence I ever expected to type). Even as he proves himself more than capable of kicking ass and taking names, there’s a real sense of vulnerability to Harbour’s jaded Santa. Not just physically but emotionally.

But Harbour is just the tip of the iceberg here. The film’s cast is stacked with a murderer’s row of character actors. This is one of Violent Night‘s greatest assets, as the various members of the Lightstone family (the fabulously wealthy owners of the “family compound” mentioned in the synopsis) are on paper an assortment of stock “rich asshole types”: Beverly D’Angelo’s character is the unsparing matriarch, Edi Patterson plays the shameless suck up obsessed with her inheritance, Cam Gigandet is the pretty boy actor who thinks he’s a badass because he played one on TV, and so on.

For an example of what this could have looked like, see the opening dinner scene from the holiday horror favorite Santa’s Slay. Those characters are caricatures of a cartoonishly awful, rich family, and because of that, you don’t care when Santa comes down the chimney to brutalize them (though, to be fair, you’re not supposed to). Violent Night’s central family is the complete opposite of this. Perhaps the single best example is Trudy Lightstone. On paper, she’s the typical kid-in-a-Christmas-movie who believes in Santa with all her heart and wants her parents to make up so they can be a family again. But like her co-stars, Leah Brady elevates this could-have-been-cliche into a character that is more than the sum of her parts.

And then, of course, there are the film’s mercenary squad antagonists, each of whom has a seasonal codename. They don’t fare quite as well as many are effectively glorified extras. But those that are given something to do, certainly make the most of the opportunity, particularly Candy Cane (Mitra Suri) and Gingerbread (Andre Eriksen), who each have memorable turns in the course of the film. And while leader Scrooge (John Leguizamo) is no Hans Gruber, he is a suitably menacing (not to mention scenery-chewing) villain who has an axe to grind not only with the Lightstones but with Christmas itself.

Bottom line? Go see Violent Night. See it with a crowd. Then watch it again every December until the heat death of the universe. You won’t regret it.

Violent Night is now playing in theaters.