Film Review - Violent Night (2022)

 Violent Night stars David Harbour as Santa Claus and he is working away on Christmas Eve delivering toys and games and other presents to the children of the world but one night his reindeer fly away on him and he gets stuck at the house of a rich family called the Lightstones who are later taken hostage by a team of terrorists led by John Leguizamo so its up to Santa to grab some weapons and say Ho Ho Ho while saving that family’s Christmas.

 

Violent Night is okay but not one of the great Christmas movies for me and firstly I want to touch on David Harbour’s Santa as he is good fun to watch in this role even if at times it felt like he was impersonating John Goodman and by that I mean it feels like he is picking up where Goodman left off in terms of playing likeable everyday characters and that isn’t a bad thing here or elsewhere as Harbour is a good actor and while at times it feels like he’s given a couple of too many jokey type moments he makes the most of them for the most part.

 

Also the film has some good action moments with guns firing and hammers being wielded and traps going off like in Home Alone and the music score by Dominic Lewis isn’t too bad to listen to either even if you feel the huge inspiration of Michael Kamen’s score from Die Hard all through it.

 

But this movie has some big problems for me and the first of those is Leguizamo as the main villain, he is a good actor and is very good in another recent release the Menu but here watching him makes you appreciate so much more what it was Alan Rickman brought to Hans Gruber in Die Hard as this movie so very much wants his character to be in that same vein but instead he felt more like a senior Wet Bandit and it really hurts this movie for me.

 

Secondly the film has way too much fowl language now normally this doesn’t bother me Die Hard (the Greatest Christmas movie ever made) has plenty of cursing in it but here its just used over and over again and it really bothered me because it just felt kind of juvenile like someone learning these words for the first time and now can’t stop using them even though he really should and I wouldn’t blame them either.

 

And lastly this movie so wants to be a new Die Hard and Home Alone but every time it tries to riff on those films or do similar beats to them I was just reminded of how good those 2 films really are and all this movie can do is just fall short of that very high benchmark.

 

And so that was Violent Night and it’s a fun watch mainly due to Harbour and some of the action scenes but I would watch Die Hard and Home Alone instead as those are just so much better its beyond a joke, 2 out of 5.