Violent Night review: David Harbour’s action-Santa movie is kind of a mess

This is the pitch This is the action-comedy about Santa Claus that will make you laugh. Violent NightIt was most likely amazing. The latest addition to the “dark, transgressive Christmas movie” canon combines the subgenre’s greatest hits: It’s basically Die Hard Meetings All You Need is Home, combined with some of the eat-the-rich satire that’s dominating cinema at the moment with movies like Triangle of Sadness, MenuPlease see the following: Glas Onion. And then, of course, there’s the inviting angle of Stranger Things David Harbour stars as Santa Claus drunken. Throw in Viking flashbacks, exploding torsos, Beverly D’Angelo, a Bryan Adams needle-drop, and a script by the writing team behind 2020’s airy Sonic the HedgehogThis is what you get, which on paper may seem like the best R-rated Christmas movie ever made. But it’s this exact emphasis on cleverness over coherence that makes Violent Night so lukewarm.

There are some ofViolent Night’s sequences do fulfill the premise’s promise. An opening sequence sets the stage for a film that’s very different from the one we actually end up with: Santa Claus (Harbour) — not a delusional pretender, but the man-myth himself — sits at a bar drinking himself horizontal. He moans at the bartender that all of his magic has vanished. Today’s kids are just as greedy, cynical and demanding as their parents. All they do is “want, crave, consume.” He chugs his beer and exits out a side door. The bartender follows him, yelling that the door goes to the roof, and patrons shouldn’t be up there. After reaching the top of the hill, she can see Santa’s sleigh taking off. For a brief moment her eyes expand. She believes in magic again — until she gets soaked in Santa puke.

Universal Pictures

It is this moment that will define you. Violent Night’s cynical and starry-eyed threads successfully merge. Both are used in lame ways for most of the movie. When the writers or Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters director Tommy Wirkola need to get out from whatever narrative corner they’ve painted themselves into, they lather on the earnest evocations of the magic of Christmas. In between those moments, a sarcastic tone and a sense of superiority are established. Much of the film’s affected edginess is directed at the Lightstones, the clan of über-wealthy assholes (and one relatively normal guy, because an audience always needs a surrogate) who gather for a dysfunctional Christmas celebration shortly after the film’s boozy cold open.

Matriarch Gertrude Lightstone (D’Angelo) is some kind of billionaire power broker — the exact nature of her work and wealth remains vague, but it’s clear that she isn’t someone to be fucked with. Gertrude’s acidic parenting style has warped her kids, particularly her daughter Alva (Edi Patterson, reprising her character from The Righteous GemstonesIt’s all down to their similar last names. Alva needs validation from her mother, which her boyfriend Morgan Steel (Cam Gigandet), and her influencer son Bert Elliot (Alexander Elliot), are extensions of. By comparison, Lightstone son Jason (Alex Hassell) and his young daughter Trudy (Leah Brady) are remarkably well adjusted, but that may come down to the influence of Trudy’s mom, Linda (Alexis Louder).

The Hans Gruber, a career criminal led by John Leguizamo, takes the Lightstone family hostage on Christmas Eve. He is a vicious, hard-nosed, baddie known as Scrooge. The crooks’ stated goal is to steal $300 million in cash from the Lightstone family vault. What if some rich jerks are killed in the process? It’s okay. The film doesn’t do a very good job arguing for why the audience should care whether the protagonists survive the night — it’s a mean-spirited film all around, so evoking basic human dignity is a bit of a cheat. Regardless of their merits, they should be saved.Violent Night gives the Lightstones their own John McClane: Santa Claus, who’s also trapped in the Lightstone mansion after drunkenly falling asleep in a massage chair mid-cookie binge.

Universal Pictures

But Santa Claus isn’t much of a character to build a movie around, or at least Harbour’s version of him isn’t. The film is long and reflects Harbour’s wandering around the estate or his love for young Trudy, who he gave him as a gift at the start of the movie. (How Santa got the other radio is one of those “Uhhhh, Magic?” moments, or maybe an editing issue.) Santa’s motives will seem less logical the longer the movie takes with him. And the audience has a lot of time to think about these things — Violent Night The script becomes too earnest and talky mid-sentence, slowing to a crawl.

Harbour is the only actor who really shines when playing this part. Harbour sneaks behind other bad guys, grins on with great fervor, laughs with one-liners and does surgery with his own sewing kit. A flashback to the past occurs midway through. NorthmanThis sequence, which is a rerun of the original Christmas Eve scene, shows that Santa was once a Viking warrior called Nicomond The Red. His propensity to commit skull-smashing violence can be conveniently activated by the terrifying circumstances. It’s an amusing idea, so it’s really too bad that the actual action in Violent Night This is why it’s so fragile. It’s partially a choreography problem and partially a sound-effects problem, but either way, the result is like listening to music on a stereo with one broken speaker. The film lacks focus, but the horror splatter effects look great and are very satisfying.

Photo: Allen Fraser/Universal Pictures

Violent Night works best when it captures the warped sensibilities of early-’90s Chris Columbus movies, particularly All You Need is Home. It’s been pointed out so often that it barely needs to be said that the events of that film are actually horrifically traumatizing and violent, and that Macaulay Culkin’s Kevin McCallister is a pint-size sociopath. Little Trudy Lightstone has a sadistic streak in her, too, and the film’s most demented scenes are played with an outsized sense of cheer that effectively creates a sense of giggly discomfort. These moments were deliberately created. While the film does have some fun with its snarky dialogue and horrific bloodshed towards the audience, it is overall very enjoyable. Violent Night’s big red bag of self-aware tricks is overstuffed.

Violent NightOn Dec. 2, the movie opens at theaters