Silent Night (2023) Review: 5/5 “Deck the Halls with Blood . . . John Woo is Back Baby!”

For as long as the cinema has existed, John Woo, Asian action movie extraordinaire, who directed such classics as the Killer (1986), about a hitman who in the middle of the hit blinds a female singer during a botched hit, and the rest of the film is the hitman paying for his sins by doing enough jobs to cure the singers blindness, is back at it again.

            For the past twenty years, the action film has been through really weird typecastings. You had queer almost fem boys like Ryan Gosling trying to fill that role with Drive (2011), but somehow, doesn’t really hit the mark. Where no man has the balls to shove a pistol into a man’s face, and just shoot indiscriminately at bad people, because somehow, Hollywood makes you feel sorry for the pedophiles and creeps that the good man has been attacked by.

            Not Silent Night.

            Produced by John Woo, and the John Wick franchise creators, and starring Joe Kinneman, the film, to summarize is pretty standard. A man loses his son to stray gun violence by a local gang. He’s gunned down mercilessly, as his wife nurses him back to health. Played by Catalina Sandino Moreno, who starred in 2004’s Maria Full of Grace. Moreno somehow builds up her resentment for Kinneman who doesn’t speak to her. He’s lost in his grief, but she’s trying, and he won’t respond. In the hospital window, a small parakeet lands. It’s not a dove, to which I was offended by, but I will explain that later.