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Violent Night

First up - great title, Violent Night. Combine these words on the poster with a bedraggled, blood-encrusted Santa Claus, chewing a candy cane like Eastwood chewed his cigar, and you've done half the job of selling the film. It also helps that it's a riot of inappropriateness - vomit, piss and (reindeer) shit all occur within the first few minutes, with the blood and gore soon to follow. Season's greetings to all!

David Harbour plays Santa, disenchanted and ready to hang up the sack, when he drunkenly stumbles into a criminal heist situation at a luxurious mansion. The unimportant upshot is the family matriarch, Gertrude Lightstone (Beverly D'Angelo), has illegally ferreted away a stash of millions in her vault, which boss wrong'un, Scrooge (John Leguizamo) has sniffed out (how? again, not important). The heart, and the cheese, of the film rests with Gertrude's granddaughter, Trudy (Leah Brady) and, to a lesser extent, her separated parents, Jason and Linda (Alex Hassell and Alexis Louder). Aside from the big fella, they're the only likeable characters in the place, by design.

Well, that's the set-up, and all that's left is to have at it. Here's where the film delivers in spades. The fight scenes are wondrously brutal, inventive and squirm-inducing. There's one scene on a ladder that produced a theatre-wide "UUURRRRGGHHH", quickly followed by roars and giggles. Harbour puts some of his Hellboy skills to good use, and his performance as a whole is exceptional. He plays this iconic role like a washed-up David Mamet everyman, by way of King Lear. With a massive metal hammer. And the weird thing is, he's the most believable character in the film. The production company behind this is 87North Productions, co-run by David Leitch. He's the director of Atomic Blonde, Deadpool 2 and Bullet Train, amongst others, and he has a long CV in the stunt caper. The job of directing this film was given to Norwegian, Tommy Wirkola (of Dead Snow 'fame') but Leitch's experienced dabs are all over Violent Night.

You may be wondering whether the nice people survive all the carnage, whether the baddies get their lumps of coal and whether Santa re-discovers his passion, and well, yeah, of course they all do, but that's hardly the point of the film. The cliches of past Christmas films are played out to juxtapose with the broken legs and torn off skin, and it all balances out pretty well. There have been a few attempts to grot up Saint Nick (see Bad Santa, Fatman and Finnish effort, Rare Exports) but I reckon this film has knocked them all into the mulcher.

Violent Night is on wide release around the country.

See also:

There are elements of John McTiernan's Die Hard (1988) and a bloody piss-take of Chris Columbus' Home Alone (1990), though I can't really recommend that, as I haven't seen it.

SPOILERS IN POD!!

(Film stills and trailer ©Universal, 2022)

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