‘Ho Ho Ho-ly shit…’
Anti-Christmas movies have always held a certain fascination for a certain type of cinemagoer. Sometimes Bad Santa or Die Hard is just what you need after days of sickly sweet, sentimental Christmas fare. Then you’ve got the horror films – Black Christmas; Christmas Evil; Silent Night, Deadly Night… classics of the genre all. Violent Night attempts to sit somewhere in the middle of all those films and is mostly successful…
Santa (David Harbour) has become old and embittered. Drunk, belligerent and lacking in Christmas spirit, he finds his festive fervour reawakened when he accidentally walks into the middle of a robbery. John Leguizamo leads a team of criminals into the house of wealthy socialite Gertrude (Beverly D’Angelo – a clever bit of casting as she, of course, played Ellen Griswold in Christmas Vacation) and violence ensues.
First off, Harbour has a ball as the big guy and, to be honest, he is the only reason this film works at all. Leguizamo does a lot of moustache twirling and scenery chewing and D’Angelo is a lot of fun as an evil matriarch, but the rest of the cast doesn’t offer much and Tommy Wirkola’s film is half an hour too long and tonally uneven. It’s a tough brief to incorporate ultra-violence, laughs and Christmas spirit and Violent Night only partly succeeds. The other issue here is that I didn’t care about the rich people squabbling inside the besieged house. We are never given a reason to care about them and subsequently, the scenes that take place inside the house that don’t feature Santa are laborious.
If you’re looking for an antidote to the usual saccharine Christmas films, Violent Night is a decent addition to the canon. Harbour makes for a fantastic old Saint Nick – it’s just a shame the rest of the film doesn’t match his stellar performance.