Huh. Apparently, this was my John Leguizamo weekend. He was in The Menu as one of the obnoxious customers, and he appears in Violent Night too as the primary antagonist. Is this just one huge coincidence? I mean, yeah. Obviously. He’s a talented actor that gets a lot of work, and it just so happened he had two come out around the same time that I really wanted to see. I liked The Menu. Would I also enjoy Violent Night?
It has David Harbour playing Santa as an action movie hero. If nothing else, it wins on the premise, and between Hellboy, Red Guardian, and this Santa, Harbour seems to have become the go-to guy for unconventional action heroes.
Santa is depressed. No one really has the Christmas spirit anymore. All kids ask for is cash and video games he doesn’t understand. He’s thinking of calling it quits. But then the unexpected happens: while dropping off gifts in the stately manner of Gertrude Lightstone (Beverly D’Angelo), armed thieves burst in, murder all the security guards and servants, and round up the entire Lightstone family, gathered there to have a very bitchy Christmas. Among them, though, is young Trudy Lightstone (Leah Brady), a good little girl who easily made Santa’s “nice” list. Santa doesn’t really want to get involved, but he can’t leave a little girl like that behind even if much of the rest of her family seems to be made up of fairly awful people.
The thing is, the thieves’ leader, calling himself “Scrooge” (Leguizamo), really hates Christmas. He and his team really want a large sum of money that Gertrude has hidden in a safe in her basement. The thing is, Santa wasn’t always Santa. He does possess some “Christmas magic,” but even he doesn’t quite understand how it works. How did he become Santa? The movie never says, but it does say what he was before he was Santa, and while Santa may not seem like much, he’s a lot more than he appears to be, and it may not be too long before a lot more people find themselves believing in Santa again and possibly regretting it.
Oh man did I have fun with this one. Harbour’s got this world-weary thing going on right now that really works here, and Leguizamo makes a nice villainous counterpoint to him. Yes, the various Lightstones are largely rote characters that may not elicit much sympathy in many cases, but that’s not really the point. You want to see a violent comedy about Santa Claus taking on and taking out heavily armed bad guys? You will get that, and it was often quite funny. I don’t often laugh out loud at movies, but I did a few times here. One online critic I follow referred to this movie as if Billy Bob Thorton’s Bad Santa was the actual Santa. Toss in a Die Hard angle, and you have this movie, with maybe a dash of Miracle on 34th Street and one other Christmas comedy that the movie references directly that I won’t mention here.
And yet…in many ways, this is actually a very traditional Christmas movie. The aforementioned critic also mentioned that a mall Santa that appears in the opening scene is played by an actor who has become something of a regular in Hallmark Christmas movies, and many of the things that happen wouldn’t look too out of place out of many a Christmas movie. Between the swearing, blood, and violence, there are a lot of those moments, moments where estranged married couples make up and families grow closer, moments that are hardly shocking, but show if nothing else that the people who made Violent Night very much aware of what this genre expects and still made sure to include it. That actually added to the fun a bit, and I really enjoyed the heck out of this one.
Grade: A-
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