In short: Violent Night (2022)

Santa Claus (David Harbour), in a somewhat bitter and cynical mood as apparently absolutely everybody is these days, runs into a spot of bother when doing his gifting biz in the “compound” of a stinking rich family. For a guy who likes Christmas-themed codenames (clearly for ironic reasons, because he’s that kind of asshole) and goes by Mr Scrooge himself (John Leguizamo) has chosen Christmas Eve for heisting the hidden millions of the family with his gang. Turns out Santa has quite a bit of combat experience from his time as a Norse raider, and properly motivated by the mandatory little girl (Leah Brady) who really really believes in the spirit of the season, he’ll go Bruce Willis on quite a few people. The resulting combination of brutal violence and speeches about the spirit of Christmas are apparently the ideal way to bring a family of rich nogoodniks back together as well as renewing our hero’s belief in his role.

Yup, Violent Night as directed by Tommy Wirkola and written be Pat Casey and Josh Miller is indeed a conscious attempt at getting back to the old “Die Hard but…” formula. I’m usually pretty fond of this particular rip-off sub-genre, and it’s particularly difficult to complain about a film that goes about its work this honestly and this enthusiastically. Because that’s clearly not enough for the filmmakers, they don’t just use Old Saint Nick as their action hero, but let him bring all kinds of clichés and tropes of Christmas movies to the table Bruce Willis didn’t have to cope with. Given the contrast between the fun – and often wickedly funny – violence, you might at first think the film’s actually trying to satirize these clichés.

However, Violent Night’s treatment of childish wonder and the power of belief™ is as gratingly earnest as you’d find in any good(?) Christmas special, giving a film full of cynically funny violence a strange air of naïve earnestness. I’m not at all sure if this is the sort of thing I wanted from this particular film, but I found myself buying into its nonsense quite well while watching it, so I’m not going to complain, and instead just continue to look a bit puzzled, humming Christmas tunes in February (because that’s of course when German distributors put a Christmas movie onto streaming services).

Easier to comprehend is Wirkola’s still sure hand in staging funny violence and snarky family troubles while having things look slick as hell, as are Harbour’s and Leguizamo’s often very funny performances. The humour, pretty much a given in a film of this style, whatever style that actually is, is of course about as subtle as Santa’s hammer (it’s a whole thing), but anyone going into a Wirkola Die Hard movie about Santa expecting subtlety will be lost anyway, and will most certainly not enjoy themselves as much as I did.

Hellboy (2019)

Given the amount of rumours about this being a troubled production where producers, director and actors were all pulling the film into completely different directions (and you know it’s gonna be bad when actors start to believe they can drag a film away from its director), it’s not exactly a surprise that the reboot of the adaptation of Mike Mignola’s great comic universe turns out to be a bad movie. What is a surprise is how bad it is, or rather, how it manages to be bad in basically every single aspect, some of whom the sort of conceptual stuff that can’t be blamed on the actual production but must have been decided early in pre-production.

Why “reboot” the Hellboy movies when you then go on to adapt a storyline taking place late in the comic’s run that really needs about two or three movies worth of preparation to work and simply to make sense on more than the most basic level? But then, nobody involved actually does seem to have had more than the most basic understanding of the comic they were adapting, what it is about, and how it speaks about the things it is about. Hint: it’s not shit that can be set to crap rock riffs. And while Andrew Crosby’s (or whoever actually “wrote” this stuff without having their name in the dirt/credits) script runs roughshod over the storyline it is supposedly adapating, it still manages to introduce characters a movie audience won’t know about as entities Hellboy knows well, adding practically absurd amounts of expository dialogue that explains very little of help as well as a handful of badly placed flashbacks. I really don’t want to know what anyone who hasn’t read the comics makes of Baba Yaga, for example.

Speaking of flashbacks, particularly ill-advised is the one concerning Hellboy’s appearance on Earth because it is very much reshooting the start of Del Toro’s Hellboy as if to really show off everything that’s wrong with Neil Marshall’s version here - namely, the acting, the laughable writing, and production design that neither hits the unified aesthetics of the Del Toro version, nor that of the comics, nor one of its very one. For one of the worst things about this film full of bad things is how little the whole production cares about looking and feeling good or coherent, or building up a mood (any mood would do!). It’s random crap monster designs thrown against random, badly framed backdrops, edited without any feeling for style or finesse, action scenes that seem perfunctory to a degree that seems ridiculous in a Marshall film, and a desperate attempt at hawking a godawful “Songs from the Motion Picture” mp3 packet by drowning everything in perfectly shitty guitar riffs. You’d think this was some sort of parody, but really, it’s a movie made by people who can’t understand the difference between the Weird and the inanely goofy, and who sure as hell have neither much knowledge of nor respect for the comics they are adapting.


I could probably berate the actors too (shouldn’t Milla Jovovich after decades of acting by now know that part of that whole acting thing is moving one’s face to express human emotions, and should Ian McShane not spend more on-screen time on the telephone, seeing as he’s phoning in his performance anyway?), but really, this thing has already wasted enough of everyone’s time.