The debate is over—Die Hard IS a Christmas movie. Or, at least, it’s been turned into one in the form of Violent Night, a Yuletide saga that pits everyone’s favorite jolly old soul against a band of hostage-taking thieves sorely lacking in holiday cheer.
Making over Kris Kringle (in the personage of David Harbour) into a jaded, quip-spouting hero who dishes out not only presents but pain, Dead Snow director Tommy Wirkola’s latest is a heartwarming fable stained in crimson and littered with dismembered corpses. It rings in the season with a rousingly mirthful tale that takes the template set by John McTiernan’s 1988 classic and decorates it with brutal John Wick mayhem, corny Home Alone booby traps and drunken Bad Santa humor.
Like a gift plucked from its protagonist’s magic sack, Violent Night amalgamates its spiritual ancestors for a rollicking action-comedy with its tongue—as well as a candy cane—lodged firmly in its rosy cheek.
Its confined setting is the Greenwich, Connecticut, mansion of Gertrude Lightstone (Beverly D’Angelo), a horrid tycoon whose daughter Alva (Edi Patterson) is a sycophantic gold-digger with a dim-bulb actor boyfriend (Cam Gigandet) and a social media-loving teen (Alexander Elliot), and whose son Jason (Alex Hassell) wants to leave his clan behind in order to save his marriage to estranged wife Linda (Alexis Louder) and, in doing so, to bring joy to his daughter Trudy (Leah Brady).
On Christmas Eve, they gather at the family’s enormous residence, clueless to the fact that the security and catering staff are covertly working for a criminal who wants to pilfer the $300 million in stolen cash that Gertrude is hiding in her high-tech basement vault.
That scoundrel is Mr. Scrooge (John Leguizamo), who introduces himself by declaring, “Bah humbug, motherfucker!” Violent Night is that kind of knowingly goofy endeavor, having its good and bad guys lean heavily into ’80s-esque one-liners that play off their respective characters, such that Harbour’s Father Christmas eventually warns Scrooge—in a zoom into close-up fit for a theatrical trailer—“Santa’s coming to town!”
Serious this most definitely is not, as Pat Casey and Josh Miller’s script so openly and zanily embraces its genre fandom that both Home Alone and Die Hard are overtly referenced, and the latter is further channeled by Santa trading cat-and-mouse barbs with his adversary via walkie-talkie, and by another individual walking shoeless over ornaments that shatter into glass-y shards.
While Santa is more than up for the challenge set before him, he’s an accidental participant in Violent Night. Following a bender at an English bar where he rails, Willie T. Soke-style, against modern, greedy “little shits” that have no attention span and only covet video games, this disillusioned Santa embarks on his Christmas Eve rounds, munching on cookies and sipping glasses of milk at each stop.
When he reaches Gertrude’s estate, he treats himself to some brandy and one of Trudy’s homemade snacks, as well as a brief sit in a massage chair. His break, however, is short-lived, interrupted by gunfire from Scrooge’s henchmen, who boast holiday-appropriate nicknames and costumes, and soon find Santa hiding out in the study—thus leading to the first of many skirmishes in which Saint Nick proves himself surprisingly adept at kicking ass.
Brief flashbacks reveal that Santa was once an ancient warrior with a beloved sledgehammer named “skullcrusher,” and it’s only a matter of time before Violent Night has him show off those murderous skills in order to save Trudy, whose sole wish is for her parents to get back together, and whose virtuousness—and belief in him—is like a defibrillator to Santa’s weary soul.
To do that, he must take on the ruthless minions of Scrooge, whose avarice and cold-bloodedness is fueled by antipathy for this most holy of nights. With the gusto of a starving man at a Christmas feast, the great Leguizamo chews every inch of available scenery, and his nasty line readings hit the ideal sweet spot: just over-the-top enough to be hilarious, and yet not self-conscious enough to render the entire thing a wink-wink slog.
Leguizamo also, on more than one occasion, demonstrates an aptitude for hand-to-hand combat—no surprise given that he’s a veteran of the John Wick series, whose co-creator David Leitch produced Violent Night through his 87North Productions.
It’s Harbour, though, who makes this absurd material thrive, exuding a worn-down cynicism that masks a fundamentally pure, hopeful soul. Taking a cue from his true cinematic forefather, John McClaine, his profane Santa takes a licking and keeps on killing and wisecracking with cock-of-the-walk bravado, with the actor striking the right balance between fearsome annihilator and warm-and-cuddly do-gooder. Harbour’s charisma is the backbone of this loopy affair, propping up the functional turns from the rest of his co-stars, the best of which comes courtesy of Patterson, here doing a variation on her The Righteous Gemstones cretin.
For all its glowing, welcoming visuals, full of twinkling lights and shining tinsel, Violent Night frustratingly shrouds its vicious showdowns in darkness, thereby undermining the very money-shot carnage that is its selling point. Otherwise, however, Wirkola infuses his tale with requisite joviality. Much of that is due to a bevy of cheeky Christmas-related jokes, be it Santa muttering with disappointment about skim milk or using a sharpened candy cane as a lethal weapon.
Casey and Miller’s silly screenplay ramps up its insanity at a suitable pace, all while delivering a steady stream of amusing gags; a running bit about Santa’s mystification over how his powers actually work is almost as funny as the sight of him stripping out of his trademark uniform—revealing a torso adorned with mystical tattoos—to stitch up a gut wound and bandage it with wrapping paper and a bow.
The predictable irony of Violent Night is that, despite its sky-high body count, the film is no Silent Night, Deadly Night, or Christmas Evil but, rather, a saccharine ode to selflessness, compassion, sacrifice and the significant benefits of staying off the naughty list. Led by the magnetic Harbour and Leguizamo, it reimagines the white-bearded, red-coated icon in delirious R-rated terms without sacrificing his, or the season’s, festive spirit—and, in the process, comes across as a new franchise’s own de facto nativity.
All I now want for Christmas is Violent Night 2: Violent Nighter.
