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.

In short: The Trip (2021)

Original title: I onde dager

The married couple of unsuccessful actress Lisa (Noomi Rapace) and soap opera director Lars (Aksel Hennie) head into a cabin by the fjords owned by Lars’s father for a quiet and peaceful weekend. Nominally, this is, for in truth, both are planning to murder the other there. Fortunately, for friends of true love finding a way and such, before anyone can murder anyone else, the perhaps not quite so happy couple are visited by a trio of very violent criminals (as played by Atle Antonsen, Christian Rubeck and André Eriksen), whose various attempts at rape and murder might be just the thing so save a marriage.

I’m pretty sure there will be quite a few people who can’t stomach Tommy Wirkola’s very specific mix of 70s exploitation style home invasion horror (the only good kind of home invasion horror) and darkest comedy; it takes a very specific kind of constitution to allow a film that can get quite as nasty as this one to also be funny. Despite my love for the more unpleasant side of traditional exploitation, I often tend have problems when it is mixed with humour myself, mostly because humour often seems to cheapen the harsher elements of a film or because some things just aren’t funny.

For my tastes, Wirkola (who does of course historically have a bit of talent for his sort of thing, see Red Snow) manages the difficult task of deciding what to keep simply unpleasant, which unpleasantness can be made funny, and which simply not to touch very well indeed, knowing what kind of brutality can actually make for a good, cynical joke, and which one would be tacky to use that way.

It does of course help there, too, that Wirkola is as experienced with comical timing as well as the sort of timing needed in an ultra-violent thriller as he is. An experience that also clearly makes it easier for the guy to find the points in his tale of marriage-saving blood and guts where he can quietly push the absurdity of things so far, he’s also at least partially satirizing exactly the kind of film he is making.

Add to that a cast of actors who seem fully in on the joke and just as capable to shift codes as Wirkola is, and the resulting film is a whole lot of decidedly non-stupid fun.

In short: Dead Snow 2 (2014)

aka Dead Snow: Red vs. Dead

If you, like me, were a little afraid Tommy Wirkola’s sequel to his Nazi zombies in the snow comedy Dead Snow would end up retreading the set pieces of the first film, you can happily run out and watch this, for Wirkola goes for escalation in everything but the now piddling amount of snow while still keeping things in dimensions a comparatively low budget can handle. Dead Snow 2 is really putting the emphasis on the action comedy more than the horror comedy, though with huge dollops of pleasantly ridiculous gore, clearly realizing the first film had done everything there was to do with the more claustrophobic set-ups it used. Wirkola is a wonderful director for this sort of madcap, blood-soaked comedy action – he’s got the timing down as well as your favourite director of classic Hong Kong martial arts cinema had, and he knows how to include millions of dumb sight gags in an action scene without distracting too much from the rest of what’s going on in it.

The humour is again of a mostly low-brow, rather ruthless style that will go wherever a gory joke might lead it: if any given scene set-up will result in the question “will the film really go there?” it is most certainly going to.

Quite against my usual tastes, this approach works rather well for me in Dead Snow 2’s case, with hardly a minute going by that doesn’t at least provoke a snort – unless it provokes a groan, or the always lovely combination of both. Because this is that sort of film, there are also movie quotes that turn into inversions of the source material, American zombie hunters who are competent and ridiculous nerds and seem to be written by someone who has never met an actual American nerd in his life, a single tank (I said the budget must still have been rather low), and a climactic brawl between Nazi zombies and Soviet Russian soldiers, like the bloodiest Spencer/Hill film Italian exploitation cinema should have made.

Like everything else directed by Wirkola I’ve seen, Dead Snow 2 is fast, fun, silly and charming as hell, and while I understand why some people really can’t stand his films, I am rather happy I do.

Technorati-Markierungen: norwegian movies,in short,horror,comedy,action,tommy wirkola,vegar hoel

In short: Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters (2013)

Years after their well-known witch-related ordeal, Hansel and Gretel have grown up into two exceedingly attractive people with a thing for black leather (Gemma Arterton and Jeremy Renner, who both seem to have a lot of fun with their roles), and live out their hatred of witches by working as witch hunters for hire.

But don't worry, Gretel prefers a fact based hunting approach to the job, so innocents need not fear, as the film's first post-credit sequence proves by having our heroes save innocent (well, more or less) Mina (Pihla Viitala) from being burned at the stake, enraging the local Sheriff (Peter Stormare) in the process. Little do our heroes expect that beautiful Augsburg will have more than the usual amount of witch-napped children and a normal witch hunt for them, and will even reveal the secrets of their past to them.

Grand witch Muriel (Famke Janssen, eating scenery with the same relish you'd show eating a candy witch house before you realize there's a witch living in it) and a whole bunch of black metal band rejects have plans to brew some very special potions that will make them impervious to the witch's worst enemy, fire. They just need some very special ingredients. Let's hope our heroes and their arsenal of improbable weapons will be up to the task at hand.

Going into Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, a lot of critics seem to have expected to find a deep and profound work reflecting on the nature of humanity, or bourgeois life in not-17th century not-Germany, and were consequently deeply disappointed when they found these highly logical expectations confounded when they were instead confronted with what basically amounts to Van Helsing or Brothers Grimm, but not shit and reasonably short.

For me on the other hand, Hansel & Gretel is pretty much exactly what I expected of Dead Snow's director Tommy Wirkola, a man clearly talented when it comes fun, fast-paced nonsense (and lighting actresses). It's the sort of film that revels in its own (slightly gory) comic book silliness, and attempts to have at least one silly-but-cool idea that spits on the the laws of physics (stuffy old bastards) per scene. This, Wirkola achieves with a high degree of charm and efficiency, throwing silly witches, silly witch hunting techniques, and silly physics at his audience with a palpable sense of fun. But be warned: this is a movie, where witch house eating induced diabetes can become a real problem, so if that sort of thing pulls you out of the whole fairy-tale-punk mood, this is not the film for you.

Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters is very good at being the carnival ride version of a movie, without feeling the need to apologize for it, nor ever forgetting the fact that the important thing about a carnival ride isn't just that it's loud and colourful, but that it's supposed to be fun.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,german movies,tommy wirkola,in short,action,fantasy,horror,jeremy renner,gemma arterton,famke janssen,pihla viitala