Violent Night (2022, dir. Tommy Wirkola, US) by Kymm Zuckert

“Time for some season’s beatings!”

Well, ‘tis the season to start watching those Christmas movies! Last year I reviewed a whole bunch of versions of A Christmas Carol, which was great fun, and I thought I would do that again this year, as there certainly are plenty more to go through, including two brand new ones that look pretty good!

However, there are also several new non-Christmas Carol movies coming out, so let’s just check them out. 

I saw the trailer for Violent Night a couple of months ago, and it looked so funny and so tight that it really seemed like a fake trailer, and that it probably wouldn’t be improved by being two hours longer, but I was willing to give it a shot. 

Santa (David Harbour) has lost his Christmas spirit. He’s drunk and tired and bored, children are greedy and don’t really believe in him, and far too many people are on the naughty list. 

A very, very rich family named Lightstone are having a catered family Christmas party on their compound. The son, Jason (Alex Hassell, Ross from Macbeth) and his wife, Linda, (Alexis Louder), are having problems, mostly due to his family, but are attending the party for the sake of their adorable daughter Trudy, (the excellent Leah Brady). Trudy believes in Santa utterly, and is definitely on the nice list. 

Then, the caterers turn out to be a group of mercenaries, led by Mr. Scrooge (John Leguizamo), who want to steal 300,000,000 from the Lightstone matriarch (Beverly D’Angelo). It’s no spoiler to say they are extremely naughty. 

Jason gives Trudy a walkie-talkie, telling her that she can talk to Santa on it. Well, it turns out she can! Santa arrives to leave presents while the mercenaries are being mercenary, he finds out of their walkie-talkies, ends up on the same frequency as Trudy, and decided to help her and her family. 

Now, I’d say for the first third or so of the film, my prediction that it wasn’t going to be better than that perfect gem of a trailer couldn’t have been truer, but as it went on, it just kept getting better and better, and not because Santa was smashing heads with a sledgehammer, though that was in fact, excellent. 

You’ll never guess why. Not if I gave you 1000 guesses. I’ll just tell you, shall I? It was the quality of the acting. Seriously. Violent Night is good because of the acting. 

It really wasn’t necessary for it to be that good, nobody really would fault it if the cast were going through the motions, but they weren’t. They took it seriously. The characters were grounded. There was emotional truth. The filmmakers somehow made a realistic and human drama nestled in the middle of a bloody action comedy. 

The best parts of the film were the scenes between Santa and Trudy on the walkie-talkies. David Harbour is seriously a world-class actor, and little Leah Brady kept up with him beat for beat, and moment by moment. It’s not as though they are unaware what movie they are in, the big fight scenes and throw-away quips are there, too, but the quiet conversations are where this film gets its heart, and why it works as well as it does. 

Violent Night has been presented as being a cross between Die Hard and Home Alone, but the filmmakers have also said that they wanted it to be a real holiday movie infused with the spirit of Christmas, not just a head-smashing good time. Well, they did it. How do you do that? You get some good actors and let them do some good acting, that’s the trick right there. 

Kymm Zuckert is an actor/writer/native Angelino. When Kymm was a child, her parents would take her to see anything, which means that sometimes she will see a film today and say, “I saw that when I was eight, I don’t remember any of that inappropriate sex stuff!” Check out her entire 365 day blog @ https://365filmsin365days.movie.blog