Violent Night - A Pretty Entertaining Action Movie Involving a Different Kind of Santa Claus

When I saw the trailer to this movie (which I never knew existed) in the theater last week, I was immediately intrigued by the interesting premise. So once it was released yesterday, I convinced my wife to see it last night. Luckily it played in the cinema near our home so it was convenient for us. OK, I'll get to it then.

Brief Story Line

On Christmas eve, the tired and burned out Santa Claus (David Harbour - Extraction, Sleepless etc) was doing his usual run to provide gifts to the nice kids around the world. However, his work was interrupted when he reached the Lightstone family home as a group of criminals led by Scrooge (John Leguizamo - The Menu, Playing With Fire etc) were invading and trying to rob them.

Santa had no choice but try to save the family that consisted of Jason (Alex Hassel - Cowboy Bebop TV series etc) with his wife Linda (Alexis Louder - Copshop etc) and young daughter Trudy (Leah Brady), Jason's sister Alva (Edi Patterson - The Righteous Gemstones TV series etc) with her boyfriend Morgan (Cam Gigandet - Twilight, Never Back Down etc) and her son Bert (Alexander Elliot - The Hardy Boys TV series etc), and the grandmother Gertrude Lightstone (Beverly D'Angelo - American History X, Entourage TV series etc).

So how would the story conclude? You could find them all in this movie.

End of Brief Story Line

As I said above, I was intrigued when I saw the trailer of the movie as it was really interesting to see a completely different side of Santa Claus from his usually kind hearted old man to this shockingly violent person. It certainly gave a twist on the image of this jolly man that has been embedded in our minds since we were kids. Obviously such twist should not be treated so seriously and be seen as a comedy as it was meant to be. Which in this area I thought it was pretty successful in making me and my wife laughed occassionally. 

From the beginning we could already see that this Santa was really not ordinary. We enjoyed David Harbour's performance in here as he was suitable as the kind of Santa who was caught in such situation and reminded of the task he had been doing for so long by a nice kid. But apart from the twisted Santa, the story was actually pretty standard and nothing extraordinary. It's a bunch of criminals holding people hostage in one location on Christmas eve while the protagonist tried to rescue the hostages all by himself. It sounded very familiar as it reminded me of the classic 1988 movie starring Bruce Willis that raised debate if it should be classified as Christmas movie.

The action part though was really awesome. It was intense and would really satisfy fans of hand to hand fight action scenes like me and my wife. They were very brutal and violent which would justify the R rating, especially with the profound languages all around the film. It is definitely not a movie for kids, even though it was a film about Santa Claus. The film itself was only having 101 minutes so it was not overly long and I thought had just enough duration to entertain us. Oh, there was a brief mid end credit scene but there was no post end credit scene at all.

This movie was written by Pat Casey & Josh Miller (Sonic the Hedgehog etc) and directed by Tommy Wirkola who previously directed that fantasy action horror film Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters and few other action films, so he definitely had the credential in making this sort of movie. The cast, in particular David Harbour did his job nicely here, while John Leguizamo was pretty decent as the leader of the criminals. The rest were OK in their roles.

For an action comedy movie, I thought this one was pretty good. It was certainly entertaining looking at the dark side of Santa Claus, while keeping the Christmas spirit and miracle intact. It even had reference to that famous Home Alone movie which was a nice addition and provided extra fun. We also chuckled few times due to some of the comedy in the movie. Although the story was standard, but the action was excellent and made up for it. The ending was also satisfying, despite few cheesy moments before the end that to me was a bit uncharacteristic. There were plenty of classic Christmas songs in the background, including few newer songs. So if you want to see a twisted version of Santa Claus with all the actions and some comedic moments, then you can give this a try. But do not bring your children to this as it might ruin their perception of Santa Claus.

Mike's movie moments rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars