Editor’s note: Staff Writer Bulbul Rajagopal and Calendar Editor Caleb Wiseblood wrote Split Screen this week while Glen and Anna Starkey went on holiday.
Far from a saint, Santa Claus (David Harbour) finds himself in the thick of a hostage situation when an elite team of mercenaries breaks into a wealthy family’s compound on Christmas Eve. (112 min.)
Bulbul It’s obvious Violent Night director Tommy Wirkola (Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters) is a Die Hard fan. The parallels are immediate. David Harbour plays a cranky, alcohol-fueled, real-deal Santa Claus who drunkenly steers his flying reindeer and magical sleigh across the skies to deliver gifts and coal alike. His global assignment gets cut short when a group of murderous terrorists led by a man named “Mr. Scrooge” (John Leguizamo) breaks into the estate Santa’s arrived at to leave gifts. Santa is begrudgingly left to single-handedly John McClane his way through the Nakatomi Plaza of an East Coast mansion. It’s an original take on the St. Nick lore, what with the storyline deepening his past with hints of Santa once being a Nordic warrior. Violent Night also breathes fresh life into saccharine holiday movies. It appears to be Wirkola’s rubber stamp of approval for Die Hard as a Christmas flick, and it definitely delivers on its name. There’s plenty of stomach-turning violence and lots of classic bare feet shots a la Die Hard. Just don’t watch it on a full stomach like we did.
Caleb I concur. Do yourself a favor and see this before dinner, lunch, breakfast, or Christmas cookies rather than after. The gore is grisly enough to leave a permanent blood stain on Santa Harbour’s grizzly beard for the majority of the film. I didn’t watch any trailers for Violent Night before seeing the movie and was pleasantly surprised that it wasn’t about a serial killer in a Santa suit, along the lines of Silent Night, Deadly Night and similar slashers. Violent Night won me over almost immediately, as soon as I realized this was about the one true Santa—from the North Pole, married to Mrs. Claus, employer of elves, etc.—becoming an action hero to protect a wealthy family from a team of thugs pulling off a heist, like Bulbul said, Die Hard-style. And the Christmas movie references don’t stop there. The matriarch of the extravagant household under attack is Gertrude Lightstone, played by Beverly D’Angelo, who invites her son, daughter, in-laws, and grandchildren over for Christmas Eve festivities. D’Angelo’s casting has to be a nod to her role in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. Once Mr. Scrooge and his crew take control of the mansion, one of Lightstone’s grandchildren, Trudy (Leah Brady), performs some heroics of her own to thwart the villains in Home Alone-esque fashion—but with R-rated gruesomeness. The consequences of Trudy’s homemade booby traps are more than enough to warrant Violent Night‘s rating, independent of Harbour’s blood-soaked shenanigans.
Bulbul Yeah, as fun as this movie was to watch, the gore might have been too much for me to handle in a theater. I’d recommend streaming this at home with a group of friends. You can quickly skip over all the messy scenes that get gratuitously violent. I get it. It’s right there in the name, what did I expect? I love action movies, but Violent Night‘s action felt like a lot. The four people in our theater (including Caleb and me) winced our way hard through most of it. But the overall story is creative, and I wish I got to know more about Santa’s past life. I liked that there wasn’t a ham-fisted holiday romance in Violent Night. But I heard there’s a sequel on the way with Mrs. Claus in it. So, maybe I’ll get both!
Caleb Another sequel rumor going around is that there’s an entire Violent Night cinematic universe in the works, akin to Marvel’s shared movie continuity, with other holiday mascots and magical entities set to make appearances in future films. Harbour playfully suggested the casting of Pedro Pascal as the Easter Bunny and Oscar Isaac as the Tooth Fairy during a recent interview. If that’s the case, take my money now! I’d be on board for any sequel as long as Harbour is still the one filling Santa’s boots. What I really enjoyed about his performance is he’s definitely world-weary, but not in an overly grumpy way. He’s got a dark past and seems reluctant, even confused and mystified at times, about his dutiful role as St. Nick, as if it might have been a curse placed upon him. But he’s still the optimistic, greeting-card version of Santa when it comes to interacting with kids. He only goes full Gran Torino on the film’s big baddies. I wouldn’t want to be on this Santa’s naughty list. Δ
Staff Writer Bulbul Rajagopal and Calendar Editor Caleb Wiseblood wrote Split Screen this week. Send comments to gstarkey@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Dec 15-25, 2022.