Last year, beloved action luminary John Woo returned to the world of Hollywood cinema for the first time in 20 years. He directed four historical epics, a wuxia adventure, and one return to form in the meantime. The result of his long-awaited American return was Silent Night. It’s a grim, violent, fast-paced action thriller with almost no spoken dialogue. It didn’t exactly dominate the box office, but the critics loved it. Now, nearly eight months later, Silent Night has fans around the world, thanks to Amazon Prime Video.
John Woo Made Silent Night a Quiet Success on Amazon Prime Video
Silent Night has one of those refreshingly simple revenge thriller premises. It’s an absolutely barebones plot, but the imagery carries it beyond many of its countless competitors. Joel Kinnaman stars as Brian, a grieving father who loses his beloved son to a gang shootout. Brian quickly seeks revenge, only to get shot in the throat for his trouble. The unpleasantly stereotypical gangsters robbed him of his son and his speech, but his story isn’t over. Brian shoots, stabs, and punches his way through the perpetrators. His wife, Saya, tries desperately to pull him off the path of vengeance. She’s unsuccessful, unfortunately, leading to countless deaths and several solid action set pieces. This film leans pretty heavily on the downside of revenge movies, but it still rings hollow as the audience laughs and claps at every brutal kill. It’s a visual tone poem with enough corpses to fill a town.
Silent Night made just over $11 million at the box office. Most estimates put its production budget somewhere around $10 million, suggesting a considerable overall loss. I can’t know what they spent on marketing, but I saw a ton of ads for the project during its release window. It’s sad to see a John Woo movie tank in the modern era. It’s not as if the American audience has outgrown his work. Silent Night is far from his best. If he managed to crank out something charmingly unhinged like Face/Off again, the world would likely rally around it as a masterpiece. His previous American film, 2003’s Paycheck, was considerably more successful. It’s essentially a lackluster version of Total Recall with Ben Affleck in the lead role, but it made $117.2 million on a $60 million budget. Silent Night was an improvement, but audiences didn’t reward it.
John Woo’s next project, at least as far as we know, is an American remake of his seminal 1989 classic, The Killer. He tagged Game of Thrones star Nathalie Emmanuel for the lead role. It’s supposed to drop directly onto Peacock with Universal producing. I don’t know whether that film will ever get off the ground, as no one seems to have mentioned it in a year. John Woo can succeed in Hollywood. He’s proven that several times. Silent Night wasn’t the right project, but there’s still a place for this Hong Kong action legend. We all love the movies that borrow from him.
