‘Violent Night’ Review
Stars: David Harbour, John Leguizamo, Beverly D’Angelo, Alex Hassell, Alexis Louder, Trudy Lightstone, Edi Patterson, Cam Gigandet, Brendan Fletcher, Mike Dopud | Written by Pat Casey, Josh Miller | Directed by Tommy Wirkola
What do you get if you cross Die Hard, Bad Santa, Home Alone and Santa Claus: The Movie? The answer is Violent Night, a violent Christmas comedy horror that mixes up multiple festive favourites and just about gets away with it.
Directed by Tommy Wirkola (Dead Snow), the film stars David Harbour as a depressed Santa Claus (the real one), who we first meet drowning his sorrows in a pub in Bristol, of all places, before taking off in his sled and vomiting on the bar’s owner from mid-air. With the tone set, we move to the house of the ultra-rich Lightstone household, where mean-spirited matriarch Gertrude (Beverly D’Angelo) has gathered various family members for Christmas Eve, including 7 year-old Trudy (Leah Brady) and her father Jason (Alex Hassell), who seems to be the only nice Lightstone.
However, the Lightstones have reckoned without Scrooge (John Leguizamo), a criminal who knows Gertrude has $300 million stashed in her basement vault, and stages a house invasion-slash-hostage situation in order to get his hands on it. So when Santa arrives at the Lightstone house to deliver his presents, he finds himself slap bang in the middle of a Die Hard-style heist and enlists Trudy’s help in taking out Scrooge and all his Christmas code-named henchmen.
Striking the right balance between horror and comedy is always difficult, so trying to make heartwarming Christmas schmaltz sit side-by-side with festive gore and violence is doubly difficult. However, Wirkola mostly manages to hit more than he misses, and he’s understandably put more emphasis on the horror side of things, just to be on the safe side.
Accordingly, Wirkola stages a number of inventive set-pieces, whether it’s Trudy using the fact that she’s just watched Home Alone to rig up a series of nail-based death-traps in the attic, or an inspired use of one of Santa’s special powers, which gives the film its goriest moment. There are plenty of good festive violence jokes too, e.g. Santa stabbing people in the throat with a sharpened candy cane, and the lighting is clever enough to make it look as if you’ve seen some really nasty stuff, even when you haven’t.
Similarly, the script (by Pat Casey and Josh Miller) does a good job of mining gags from various sources, not just from sweary lines and comic violence, but also more sweet-natured, Christmassy jokes, like Santa’s interractions with his reindeer (“I can’t stay mad at you”).
David Harbour (Stranger Things, Black Widow) proves perfect casting as Santa, striking just the right note of grumpy melancholy, but still capable of being moved by a child’s simple wish for her parents to get back together. The fact that he evidently enjoys dispatching bad guys with extreme prejudice is partly explained away by the fact that he used to be a Viking warrior back in the 1100s or so, and still has a taste for giving people a good hammering. With a hammer.
As for the supporting cast, Leguizamo is more or less on auto-pilot, but his auto-pilot is still pretty decent and he gets the job done. Alexis Louder is underused as Trudy’s mum, but she gives the film its much-needed centre of common sense and normality, while Edi Patterson is gleefully obnoxious as Alva Lightstone, whose reaction to a particular character’s death is one of several laugh-out-loud moments.
It’s fair to say that the film has a number of other problems, alongside the occasional tonal misfire. For one thing, the pacing flags considerably in the middle section (they re-do a key bonding sequence twice, for some reason) and the film could easily have lost ten or fifteen minutes from its nearly two-hour running time.
Still, those minor issues aside, this is an undeniably entertaining horror comedy mish-mash that could well achieve Christmas cult movie status. Frankly, a franchise isn’t out of the question either. Ho, ho ho, monkey farmers!
*** 3/5
Violent Night is in cinemas now.
