In the spirit of the season, good will towards men, and shooting them in the head, I’ll charitably – and I mean charitably – give Silent Night a decent rating. Even I can’t ignore John Woo’s inarguable visual style, the kinetic energy, and a wild soundtrack. But it’s a knife’s edge towards a lower score for almost everything else it does – or doesn’t – do.

The flick is about an average guy who loses his child and his voice in a gang shootout. Now silenced forever, he goes on on a revenge spree… but first he goes on a figuring out how to kill people spree.

This movie is revenge for how much I loved No One Will Save You… both 2023 flicks feature a silent protagonist and hand wavey reasons they never talk. In Save You, the main character lives alone and is dealing with aliens 90% of the time. In this, he’s silent because he can’t talk but he’s also married and in touch with the cops and we still don’t get any direct dialog. There’s some off-hand, idle mumbling of pleasantries and some text conversations, but it really struggles to maintain its gimmick. The result is a gaping hole where character and motivation go to die.

But maybe John Woo is saying “strip it all away and isn’t there really just one reason to watch a murderous revenge flick? Who are we fooling? Everything else is just a hokey morality play, a hand-waving justification for what we came here to see.”

OK fine – let’s chuck it all away and get to the good bits. But the film goes waaaay too hard on its training subplot. I appreciate our lead isn’t a human wrecking ball, but a training dummy and YouTube probably aren’t the most scintillating of content.

The actual murder spree? It’s pretty good. I’d have engaged with it a LOT more if I gave a rat’s ass about anyone in the movie. Happily (I suppose) it’s super stylish and violent enough for me to begrudgingly accept that the flick is good at what it does. I may not have cared, but at least it was propulsive, moderately exciting, and it had a thumping soundtrack.

Full of John Woo’s slick, blunt style, it’s bold enough, brash enough, and loud enough to earn some charity. If you aren’t like me and are more willing to go with action for action’s sake, you’ll probably love it to death. Me? Pure charity.

Score: 75