Violent Night is a perfect Christmas movie for the modern audience. It’s loud, strategically dumb (more on this later), and very, very violent.
Which is to say it’s far from a perfect movie, but a sledgehammer wielding Santa is exactly the sort of thing people will pay to see. And pay they did, because they movie did well in the box office, and already has a sequel in the making. Amid the middling cast, Santa is a perfect choice. Sure, the actor had to put on all that weight he finally dropped for the fourth season of Stanger Things, but it seems to have paid off. People want their Santa jolly and with some girth to him. Mind you, here it looks like extra padding on a muscle, enforced by the backstory of Santa being a marauder of yore in his previous life. And he doesn’t quite know how he got to be Santa or why he’s doing it. Only that he no longer enjoys it, disappointed and disillusioned by all the annoying, overprivileged and overindulged brats out there. We get that much from the opening scene where he drinks, drives, and hurls. In fact, the scene set up the movie perfectly. Moving on to a Christmas celebration at a mansion of an insanely wealthy and proportionally b*tchy matriarch and her two adult children with their families: the good son and the idiot daughter. The thing is, someone’s got the idea to hit that particular place up for all its worth while Santa gets stuck and stranded there. The thieves are comically evil, and John Leguizamo is only so believable as a man who can hold his own against this behemoth of a Santa, but since the movie is deadest on echoing one of the most famous Christmas classics of all time, complete with a precocious kid setting up traps, it doesn’t matter. The point is that Santa finds his sledgehammer and gets his groove back. It will be a very, very violent night. The strategic dumbness comes in when Santa has no idea time and again why he does what he does or how what he does works. It’s kind of clever in a way, because a. it saves the writers from having to come up with something more, and b. it creates for an interesting Santa character. Disenchanted and tired of it all but perpetuating the cycle. So, there you have it, a bombastic, ridiculous actioneer with reindeers and things. A Santa story unlike any other, saved by and large by Santa himself, played with whim and zeal and all of that by a believably tired, believably kickass, perfectly ho-ho-hoing character actor. Merry Christmas to all and to all a …violent? night 😊
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