SILENT NIGHT

John Woo is back in Hollywood after a 20 year hiatus and he brings us a holiday film featuring Joel Kinnaman as Godlock, a grieving father who goes after the gang who accidentally killed his son. Godlock works as an electrician or welder, chases down the car driving the individuals responsible for his sons death, and in the process gets shot in the throat. Left for dead, Godlock survives his injuries and plans for a year to hunt down and punish the player's involved. While I do like the fact the film has very little dialogue (and I do mean very little - maybe 5 lines are said throughout the runtime). So it was a nice feature as more of our communication is conveyed non-verbally as opposed to verbally. My issues with the film are the pacing. The story is told out of order so you're putting the pieces together the whole time but it takes more time than I would have cared for for Godlock to begin his rampage. Secondly, I wasn't wowed visually like I usually am in a John Woo film. Yes there's some cool, over-the-top death scenes but this sadly didn't feel like Woo's best effort unfortunately. Finally, being a civilian, Godlock learns how to fight with a knife and shoot via YouTube vidoes which I found to be a little bit of a cop out. If he had some background in fighting or guns, it's more plausible. But an average guy going on a killing spree like this with only online videos, that's a bit of a stretch for me. 5.5/10