‘Silent Night’ marks John Woo's triumphant, wordless return

The 77-year-old action auteur, back in Hollywood after two decades, has made… a silent action film.

Image: Lionsgate

This year, after a long absence, John Woo is back. He’s given a series of illuminating interviews, including one with Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri in which he discussed the positive re-appraisal some of his work has gotten in recent years. And now, he’s returned to Hollywood for his first American film since the Ben Affleck vehicle Paycheck, 20 years ago. 

Woo’s career is often split between the Cantonese-language films he made in Hong Kong (like The Killer, A Better Tomorrow, and Hard Boiled), and his English-language Hollywood hits like Hard Target, Face/Off, and Mission: Impossible II. The new film, Silent Night, isn’t in any language- it’s completely dialogue-free. 

The gimmick is this: The hero, the not-so-subtly named “Brian Godluck” (Joel Kinnaman) is out to avenge the death of his young son, killed in a gang crossfire, just as John Travolta’s son was killed at the beginning of Woo’s Face/Off. Brian also spends much of the film alternating between grief and revenge.  

The twist is that Brian while chasing the killers, is wounded in such a way that it makes him lose the ability to speak. And therefore, aside from a few incidental words here or there, Silent Night is entirely dialogue-free. As you may have guessed from the title and release date, there’s also a bit of a Christmas theme. 

The film also stars Scott Mescudi as a detective, and Catalina Sandino Moreno, from Maria Full of Grace, as the hero’s wife. We see the characters in happier times, which forms quite a juxtaposition with the grit and violence of Brian chasing revenge. 

Therefore, the focus is on the action- and in that respect, it’s the John Woo you know and remember. The car chases and the hand-to-hand fights are not only excellent but much better than a lot of what we see from the action cinema of today, which was certainly influenced by Woo’s work, even if it sometimes drew the wrong lessons from it. 

Then again, you could say words are overrated in the genre anyway. One of my favorite Roger Ebert reviews was of Woo’s 1996 Broken Arrow, in which he chided the filmmaker for overindulging in what Ebert called the “Fallacy of the Talking Killer”- that old James Bond trope in which the villain explains his entire evil plan rather than just kill the hero right away. 

He turns to Slater in the cockpit and . . . narrows his eyes. That's right. Narrows them fiercely and intensely. There is a lot of eye-narrowing in John Woo's movies (see especially "The Killer," where it substitutes for character development). But here it just looks goofy, as if Travolta were back in that great scene in "Get Shorty," teaching Danny DeVito lessons in how to look menacing.

Then again, Face/Off wouldn’t have been the same without some of those memorable lines, not to mention Nicolas Cage’s luxurious overacting. 

Silent Night does a great deal with this high degree-of-difficulty gimmick, although it never quite transcends it. 

And besides- it’s not the best dialogue-free movie of the year. That would be Pablo Berger’s Robot Dreams, the animated film about the friendship between a dog and a robot in 1980s New York City. It’s as different a film as can be, obviously, but it does more with the challenge of telling a meaningful story between characters who don’t talk. Expect a lot more about that movie in this space.

John Woo, at 77, has made a mostly successful film, at a time when so many directors of advanced age are making vital work- Ridley Scott, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Clint Eastwood have all made movies, or have new ones next year, past their 80th birthdays. If this wasn’t the end of his career, I would not be shocked.