{"id":143869,"date":"2022-11-30T11:18:58","date_gmt":"2022-11-30T11:18:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/violent-night-review-david-harbor-in-a-bloody-action-santa-comedy\/"},"modified":"2022-11-30T11:18:58","modified_gmt":"2022-11-30T11:18:58","slug":"violent-night-review-david-harbor-in-a-bloody-action-santa-comedy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/violent-night-review-david-harbor-in-a-bloody-action-santa-comedy\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Violent Night’ Review: David Harbor in a Bloody Action Santa Comedy"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\tThe now-ancient joke about the kind of pitches that movie executives respond to (\u201cIt’s ‘Avengers 2’\u2026meets ‘Glass Onion’!\u201d) is really about what the audience responds to. we’re<\/em> the ones who like our special-sauce tacos stuffed inside a bacon burger topped with a bun made of pizza. And \u201cViolent Night\u201d is a movie that takes the oversize appetite of the audience very seriously. The title might lead you to expect a holiday horror movie, with Santa as a mad slasher \u2014 but, you know, we’ve been there, eaten that. In \u201cViolent Night,\u201d David Harbor, that jovially quirky actor from \u201cStranger Things\u201d and the 2019 \u201cHellboy\u201d reboot, does in fact play a dissolute Santa who cruises through Christmas on a bender of holiday cookies and random alcohol, peeing and puking off the side of his sleigh \u2014 but in movies like \u201cBad Santa,\u201d we’ve tasted that fast food combo, too.<\/p>\n

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\tTo wake up the jaded taste buds of today’s holiday movie audience, you need a piece of entertainment that’s truly going to combine<\/em> flavors So consider this: a comedy about a filthy-rich family whose members can’t stand each other but gather anyway, on Christmas Eve, at the Greenwich, Conn., mansion of their misanthropic matriarch, Gertrude Lightstone (Beverly D’Angelo), for a little forced holiday cheer. Before the festivities have begun, they’re set upon by a ruthless team of home invaders led by a psycho who calls himself Scrooge (John Leguizamo). He sets the tone with a hearty \u201cBah humbug, motherfucker!,\u201d and the foul-mouthed Yuletide spirits escalate from there.<\/p>\n

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\tScrooge, who’s been casing the joint for months, knows that there’s $300 million hidden in the vault below, and he has arranged it so that everyone \u2014 catering staff, security agents \u2014 is secretly working for him. What he wasn’t counting on is Santa Claus, who’s making his yearly Christmas pitstop. Santa is a bit of a Scrooge himself: a drunk and a curmudgeon who can’t get over what consumerist zombies today’s kids have become. But he’s also got special powers. Do I mean his ability to glide, with a twinkling twitch of his nose, up and down chimneys? Or the golden digital scrolls he unfurls with a list of what each kid has done that’s naughty or nice? Surely all that.<\/p>\n

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\tMostly, though, this Santa is a weapon-welding badass. He’s many centuries old and started off, in vintage Kris Kringle fashion, as some sort of earthy Scandinavian Viking warrior. Now he’s like a member of the Expendables, dispatching enemies with old-school brutality. When he grabs a sledgehammer, he becomes a death-wish version of Thor. But since \u201cViolent Night\u201d is a Christmas movie, it’s all in good fun! Especially when Trudy (Leah Brady), the 7-year-old daughter of Jason (Alex Hassell), the only honorable member of the Lightstone clan, goes \u201cHome Alone\u201d medieval on the asses of the home invaders. Ladders are booby-trapped so throats get pierced with nails; heads are scalped; the pain gets brought. As someone in a movie like this might put it: That’s what I’m talkin’ about<\/em>. Or maybe I should just say: Have yourself a bloody little gonzo action Christmas. <\/p>\n

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\tOver the last week, everyone in entertainment media, including me, has churned out hand-wringing articles about how the acclaimed awards films are all fizzling at the box office. One after another, \u201cT\u00e1r,\u201d \u201cThe Banshees of Inisherin,\u201d \u201cShe Said,\u201d \u201cTriangle of Sadness,\u201d and \u201cTill\u201d are all crawling their way to a gross of maybe $10 million. (\u201cThe Fabelmans,\u201d with a more high-profile pedigree, will probably crawl its way to $20 million.) We know that this is the age of Marvel, so \u201cBlack Panther: Wakanda Forever\u201d is the triumphant counterexample. But even in 2022, people don’t just<\/em> go to Marvel movies. One of the things that’s defeated adult moviegoing is the insatiable hunger for unabashed junk food like \u201cViolent Night.\u201d The movie has no comic-book hook; it’s a trash-compactor genre buffet that smashes together a dozen things you’ve seen before. thigh that’s<\/em> the hook. \u201cViolent Night\u201d is amusing in a few spots, wearying in more than a few others, but to complain about it in the way that I’m doing is to come off as churlish. It’s a movie that feeds the beast.<\/p>\n

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\tDavid Harbor gives off of a ping of likability, and that makes him the right actor to play a down-in-the-dumps, vengeance-is-mine Santa who is really, beneath his bloody mottled gray curls, the Christmas mensch we want him to be John Leguizamo, as always, refuses to phone anything in; as Scrooge the sociopath who hates Christmas, he makes every obscenity pop. Beverly D’Angelo, Edi Patterson, and Cam Gigandet play the rest of the Lightstone clan as walking high-camp horrors, and Alexis Louder, as Jason’s estranged wife, lends a lone note of stubborn sanity to the proceedings. \u201cViolent Night,\u201d with its action-thriller soundtrack built around themes from classic Christmas songs, is a movie that makes you think: What’s next, \u201cMassacre on 34th St.\u201d? Christmas movies, like all Hollywood pulp, build on one another, and maybe this is just one more age-of-nothing-sacred holiday mish-mash, but \u201cViolent Night,\u201d depending on how it performs, could open the door to a new kind of down-and-dirty Christmas\/action hybrid. Just imagine hearing lines like \u201cGod bless us \u2014 every one, motherfucker!\u201d<\/em> The possibilities are endless.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n