In short: Silent Night (2023)

Brian (Joel Kinnaman) loses his little son in a drive-by shooting. His unsuccessful attempt at doing a spur of the moment bit of vigilantism leaves him badly hurt and without a voice box. The now silent protagonist starts on a course of a lot of wordless emoting. During this he ruins his marriage by focussing on training up for some better vigilantism instead of recognizing he might not be the only one grieving here.

Once he’s ready, he’s going to murder a whole lot of gang members coming up on a Christmas Eve climax.

It’s nice that John Woo uses his latest stint in the West to try his hand at a formal experiment. However, the film’s high concept that an unspeaking protagonist means practically nobody else is speaking either never feels organic in the film as it plays out. Worse, the self-inflicted wordlessness undermines Woo’s ability to give the melodrama that always was part and parcel of his films beside the action the proper emotional weight. Turns out you can only show a perfectly game Kinnaman smashing furniture and murdering people as an expression of deep emotions so many times.

This leaves the action to carry everything here, and even though Woo clearly hasn’t lost his ability to show people getting shot, mauled, and so on in various exciting ways, the action does lack the kind of anchor dialogue and the kind of more complex characterisation that comes with it should have provided. Conceptually, the action sequences suffer from a certain video game quality – rather fitting to a silent protagonist, to be fair – that robs them of the impact really good action cinema is supposed to have.

Here, the escalation in violence feels less like a part of the film’s dramatic engine but as if Woo would drag Kinnaman into a new level in a third person shooter.

The Christmas gimmick, by the way, is absolutely wasted.

Mission: Impossible II (2000)

Rogue IMF agent Sean Ambrose (Dougray Scott) and his team of rogues steal the lab-made disease “Chimera” a crazy Russian scientist made for an Australian pharma company. Given what happened in the first movie, the IMF seems to have a bit of a problem with rogue agents committing supervillainy.

Fortunately, still tiny, not quite as shouty anymore, super agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise, smugly grinning like a loon for the whole first act for reasons only known to himself; the movie even makes it part of its villain’s motivation instead of telling Tom to cut it out) is put on the case. Before really starting on the mission, he is supposed to recruit sexy jewel thief Nyah Hall (the artist now known as Thandiwe Newton). The recruitment is more like a short courtship dance, and before you can doubt anyone’s professionalism, they have already copulated and fallen for each other deeply (at least for this movie). Which gets a bit awkward when Ethan’s boss (an Anthony Hopkins cameo) explains that Nyah is a former girlfriend of Ambrose’s and supposed to help them via good old sexspionage instead of thievery.

That makes Hunt so grumpy, he’s going to stop grinning for the rest of the movie, so good job there, Anthony Hopkins. But needs must, so sexspionage it is. This being a Mission: Impossible movie, a heist and various action scenes are of course going to follow.

This being a John Woo movie, a misplaced pigeon, as well.

Four years after the first MI movie, Cruise has settled into his star persona, which leaves us with less strained attempts at acting and a leading man who is quite a bit more assured in front of the camera, but also one who really insists on showing off in as many scenes as possible, and can demand to get more close-ups than, say, the rather more talented and close-up worthy Newton. There’s also at least one pointless vanity scene showing Cruise rock-climbing early on, which, combined with the antiseptic vibe of the “romance” between him and Newton’s Nyah, makes the first act a bit of a slog.

There’s little interest in team work as a core value of the franchise here anymore, either, so that the thing can turn into even more of the Cruise show.

Scott isn’t great shakes as a villain either, and never feels like the properly oversized threat towards all that is right and good in the world he needs to be to work against Cruise’s plot-armoured Hunt.

To be fair to MIII, there are a quite a few great action sequences in here, but then, great action sequences are only half of what made Woo one of the greatest action directors of all time. The other half is pairing the action with an operatic sense of melodrama, blood with tears. You can see where the film wants to deliver this all-important connection, but with a weak Scott and a Newton that’s never allowed as much space as Cruise, there’s really nobody for the film to connect Cruise with properly, so the melodrama feels hollow and never satisfies emotionally .

Past Misdeeds: Hard Target (1993)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

When Nat Binder (Yancy Butler) comes to New Orleans looking for her long-time estranged, now missing, father, she doesn’t expect to find out he was homeless. She certainly didn’t suspect he has become the victim of one of the hunts for the ever popular Most Dangerous Game non-American (possibly even European!) bad guys Emil Fouchon (Lance Henriksen) and Pik van Cleaf (Arnold Vosloo) hold for their rich perverted clients. Their particular shtick is that the hunt’s designated prey consists exclusively of former military personnel who have fallen on hard times; don’t worry though, they’re certainly not going to play fair when helping their clientele getting their victim.

Given how little Fouchon and his cronies care for human life (or a sensible way to keep their hunts secret, now that I think about it), Nat would probably have a rather short life too, if she didn’t fall in early with former special forces super Cajun Chance Boudreaux (Jean-Claude Van Damme, whose accent is totally not Belgian, no sir), a man quite able to turn the tables on these particular hunters. Well, he was born on the Bayou, etc.

Oh, I still remember how cranky I was in the 90s when John Woo’s move to Hollywood turned out the way that it did, with the director seemingly trading downwards in every aspect of filmmaking, and quickly turning all his stylistic idiosyncrasies into mere tics and shtick. Now, more than twenty years later, it has become quite a bit easier to look at the resulting films with a more fair eye, and to possibly even enjoy them.

Sure, the part where Woo’s films were now seemingly crapping doves without any good reason (turns out when you overuse a metaphor this much, it ends up signifying nothing whatsoever) is still there, but when I start to let myself be dissuaded by a handful of random dove appearances, I really should stop watching the kind of films I do. But then, Woo’s particular style of dance-like ultra-violence and slow motion melodrama always was and is a thing teetering on the border of self-parody, as directorial styles following the dogma that style is substance (which I am wont to believe in too) inevitably must be; it’s a question of individual taste where awesome stylized gun opera starts and where silly nonsense begins, or if there’s indeed any difference between them that matters.

Re-watching Hard Target after a decade or so, I realized how close the film actually is to Woo’s Hong Kong work, or rather, how much those films traded in the same kind of silliness and excess. I also realized I’m now very much willing to just go with the sort of world where doves teleport in at the slightest provocation, where crossbow bolts inevitably fly around in slow motion, where gun hands are positioned in the most improbable ways, and where things explode or catch fire for the slightest of reasons, even when the film these things happen in was made in the USA. In fact, I’m at a point in my always regressing taste where I find stuff like this absolutely lovely, and wouldn’t have the film any other way. Particularly when these tasty morsels come with an added dose of kitschy (but not necessarily untrue) poverty porn, the (completely true) insight that all rich people are evil while the poor have dignity and interesting haircuts, as well as a scene where Wilford Brimley rides in with bow and arrow like a particularly absurd version of the cavalry, and shoots as if he were trying our for the role of Old Man Hawkeye. Indeed, that’s all included in the film – even the Brimley stuff that somehow didn’t manage to give 17-year old me, who took these things far more seriously in exactly the wrong way than I do now, a hernia when I watched it way back when in 1993. The resulting film is indeed pretty darn great.

This does – of course – have a lot to do with some other things Woo still was perfectly capable of when he went to the US. Namely, shooting damn great, tight yet overblown (or is it the other way around) action sequences that never bog down in self indulgence so much they are ever anything less than riveting. Woo has an eye for the set piece, a heart for the melodramatic impact of the physical action, for turning a potentially clichéd shoot-out into something memorable by just the right choice of scenery and props, and a – one suspects intrinsic – knowledge of just the appropriate rhythms between camera movement, the bodies of his stunt actors and actors, and editing. There’s absolutely nothing that isn’t great about the action here.

Woo even finds it in his heart to indulge his star’s greatest weakness, and let’s JCVD do That Kick again, and again, and again. It seems to have been an excellent way to get the man to relax in front of the camera too – at least Van Damme does some of his better acting work in this stage of his career here. Why, even his one-liner delivery is for once spot on and even charming. The rest of the cast (except for Yancy Butler who has very pretty eyes and exclusively acts by widening them and letting her mouth pop open and shut randomly) is rather great too, with Henriksen giving one of his patented villain performances with great gusto, and Vosloo working as the perfect foil, while Brimford is appropriately absurd (that’s a compliment), and everybody else dies quite enthusiastically.


So, I’m sorry to add another failure to the list, past me, but you were wrong again. Hard Target is pretty damn great.

On ExB: Universal Van Damme: Hard Target (1993)

I know, I know, I’ve said, written and thought some rude things about John Woo’s American phase but now that I’ve settled into zen-like middle-age, maaaan, I’m so relaxed I’m willing to revise this kind of opinion.

So listen to my aged wisdom and click on through to this week’s column over on Exploder Button, where I’ll go deeper into that time when John Woo met Jean-Claude Van Damme.

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