Violent Night
Santa Claus is coming to town in the season’s most surprising, visceral, bloody, sentimental, funny, imaginative, distasteful and even touching entertainment.
A bad Santa, a very bad Santa: David Harbour
What if Santa Claus really did exist, but wasn’t all he was cracked up to be? Tired of the consumerist society in which we now live and disillusioned by the fact that nobody believes in him anymore, Santa (David Harbour) has decided to call it a night – and is drinking way too much to be in charge of a sleigh. We first encounter him in a bar in Bristol, England, where his tab is picked up by a local in a Santa suit. The bartender, concerned by the real Santa’s blood alcohol level, rushes out after him, only to be vomited on – from a great height. However, across the Atlantic, in Greenwich, Connecticut, a little girl called Trudy still believes in him, and her Christmas wish is to see her estranged parents reconciled. A tall order – particularly as her parents are taken hostage by a gang of ruthless thieves who have broken into her grandmother’s mansion.
To set the tone, the gang’s leader, Mr Scrooge (John Leguizamo), barks out, “Silent Night, Gory Night” and mutters, “Welcome to your worst Christmas – ever.” And to push home his point, he has every member of the staff gunned down in cold blood. At exactly the same time, Santa has popped down an upstairs chimney and is helping himself to the contents of a vintage bottle of brandy (having poured away the milk that was left for him). But before he can beat a hasty retreat, he spots Trudy through a window and, because she believes in him, he decides to stick around to see if he can help. But an overweight man past his sell-by-date is no match for a crack team of mercenaries armed with the latest in high-tech weaponry…
Drawing on such Christmas movies as Home Alone, Die Hard, The Santa Clause and Silent Night, Deadly Night, Tommy Wirkola’s Violent Night throws everything at the screen, switching genres as it hurtles through farce, horror, action and family drama, proving at different junctures to be sentimental, repellent and outrageously funny. The nine-year-old Leah Brady, who plays Trudy, even gets to impersonate Macaulay Culkin, and draws on her knowledge of Home Alone to help fight back against the intruders. She’s way too young to witness the carnage around her – not to mention overhearing all the foul language – and enters into a pact with Santa that she can only use the word ‘anus’ when appropriate. David Harbour is terrific as an icon struggling with his own identity, bloodlust and love for good children, while John Leguizamo (who was as bad as they got in Spawn) immerses himself into a role of pure malevolence, at one point utilising a Christmas toy as an implement of genital torture. Some of it is a little too much (the score is unnecessarily overbearing) but the disparate elements do muddle along nicely, culminating in a shockingly entertaining anti-Christmas concoction. After all these years, Bad Santa will have to make way for a new bad boy in the grotto.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: David Harbour, John Leguizamo, Alex Hassell, Alexis Louder, Edi Patterson, Cam Gigandet, Leah Brady, Beverly D'Angelo, Alexander Elliot, Brendan Fletcher, André Eriksen, Mike Dopud, Mitra Suri, Stephanie Sy, Sean Skene.
Dir Tommy Wirkola, Pro Kelly McCormick, David Leitch and Guy Danella, Screenplay Pat Casey and Josh Miller, Ph Matthew Weston, Pro Des Roger Fires, Ed Jim Page, Music Dominic Lewis, Costumes Laura DeLuca, Sound Patrick Haskill and Peter Staubli.
87North Productions-Universal Pictures.
111 mins. USA. 2022. UK and US Rel: 2 December 2022. Cert. 15.
