Violent Night Review: Die Hard with a Bad Santa’s Sense of Vengeance

Violent Night wants to have its Christmas cookies and eat them too.

Violent Night
Photo: Universal Pictures

While hosting Saturday Night Live in 2019, David Harbour played a human version of Sesame Street’s Oscar the Grouch in a parody trailer that poked fun at Todd Phillips’s Joker and Hollywood’s infatuation with pumping out dark and often archly ironic films about established pop-culture characters. While Tommy Wirkola’s Violent Night draws inspiration from Christmas films like Die Hard and Home Alone, both of which are referenced throughout, it bears more resemblance to that recent comedy sketch, only without any of the self-awareness about how the cynicism of films like Joker has become played out.

For his part, Harbour is committed to the film’s irascible take on Saint Nick, whose penchant for heavy drinking, cursing, and violence doesn’t completely mask his optimism and appreciation for the selflessness and innocence of children. But not long after Santa drunkenly pukes on a bartender as he flies off a rooftop on his sled, it becomes apparent that the filmmakers are bringing little to the table beyond the very things that Harbour’s SNL sketch was mocking.

Harbour is playing the real bad Santa here, but the film’s magical elements don’t exactly bring human stakes to the material, at least not of the sort that Terry Zwigoff mined from Billy Bob Thornton’s mall Santa in Bad Santa. Where Zwigoff’s film consistently, and humorously, plumbed the depths of its protagonist’s depression and debauchery, Violent Night mostly operates in half-measures. For one, it awkwardly blends its puerile brand of hyperviolence and bad-Santa hijinks with a Hallmark-style sentimentality that creeps in through the painfully rote depiction of young Trudy Lightstone (Leah Brady) wanting her estranged parents (Alex Hassell and Alexis Louder) to reconcile in time for them to celebrate the holidays together.

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Violent Night’s action plot feels equally warmed over and uninspired. A crew of baddies led by a terrorist code-named Scrooge (John Leguizamo) raids the home of the obscenely wealthy and controlling Lightstone matriarch, Gertrude (Beverly D’Angelo). This plotline blatantly fits the Die Hard mold, right down to the wounded hero in the shadows, in this case Santa, taking out the villains one by one, but without a single memorable fight sequence or set piece in sight—or, at least, ones that can be adequately glimpsed. A Christmas tree’s star is the source of one character’s grisly demise, but the action is rendered with overly dark lighting and quick cutting, effectively obscuring the details of Santa beating Scrooge and his goons to a bloody pulp.

Ultimately, though, it’s the filmmakers’ insistence on both subverting the expectations of the family Christmas film—both in its Santa-led brutality and the profanity-laden infighting of the Lightstone family—and upholding them that leaves Violent Night feeling like it wants to have its Christmas cookies and eat them too. It mocks the traditional notion of Santa Claus, then goes on to stress the importance of believing in a version of the jolly gift-giver that doesn’t exist. In the end, like Santa and Scrooge, Violent Night is a film that’s at war with itself.

Score: 
 Cast: David Harbour, John Leguizamo, Cam Gigandet, Alex Hassell, Alexis Louder, Edi Patterson, Beverly D’Angelo, Leah Brady  Director: Tommy Wirkola  Screenwriter: Pat Casey, Josh Miller  Distributor: Universal Pictures  Running Time: 112 min  Rating: R  Year: 2022  Buy: Video

Derek Smith

Derek Smith's writing has appeared in Tiny Mix Tapes, Apollo Guide, and Cinematic Reflections.

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