Review: Silent Night

A good Christmas action movie - and there aren't that many of them - keeps the Christmas side of things to a minimum. A bit of tinsel here, an exploding Christmas tree there: once you've established the ironic contrast between goodwill and a good kill, move on. A tacky jumper and a bad guy in a Santa jacket aside, Silent Night is barely holiday themed at all. If it wasn't for a calendar with KILL THEM ALL written across December 24, you wouldn't even know it's Christmas.

So it's not the holiday that gives this its title. Rather, it's the bullet to the throat that suburban dad Brian Godlock (Joel Kinnaman) takes in the opening sequence that removes his voice - and seemingly everyone else's, as this is basically dialogue-free for the 90-odd minutes plus credits run time. There's the occasional distant shout, some radio chat and a few text messages, but otherwise, as Elvis once put it, it's all about a little less conversation, a little more action please.

This isn't a new trick. The direct to streaming horror film No One Will Save You pulled it off earlier this year, though that had the advantage of being set over a handful of days in a sparsely populated stretch of countryside. Silent Night takes place over an entire year, from one bloody holiday season to the next, as Godlock recovers from his wounds - taken while chasing down and almost wiping out the drive-by shooters whose stray bullets killed his son - then trains himself up to be the ultimate killing machine while his wife (Catalina Sandino Moreno) drifts away, before he finally hits the streets of his Texas town for a night of violent revenge aimed directly at local scumbag Playa (Harold Torres) and his army of nameless goons.

It's a pretty shaky premise, but Silent Night has a secret weapon. It's the return to US shores of director John Woo, last seen in English-language cinema with 2003's Paycheck but remembered forever for Hong Kong classics like The Killer and Hardboiled alongside his one American great, Face/Off.

Despite his undeniable skill at staging action, Woo was always a poor fit for Hollywood. In part that's because he doesn't do irony; whatever his films flaws, they're always achingly sincere and blatantly emotional in a way that blockbusters then (and to a large extent now) have tried to avoid. 

Here though, he's making a Christmas movie about a grieving father; sincerity and emotion come with the territory. So while the broad outlines of this story are exactly what you expect and there are absolutely no surprises whatsoever, it's the little moments - and Woo's undeniable skill when it comes to action - that pack a punch. Godlock is driven to revenge (and to buy a cool car to do it in), but that doesn't mean he likes it, and Kinnaman gets to pull a lot of anguished and tormented faces as he takes his pain and shares it around.

Because there's no dialogue, the storytelling has to be entirely visual. Again, this plays to Woo's strengths as a film maker who tells it like he sees it. Much of the pleasure here comes from simply watching someone get good at what they're trying to do; we're well past the halfway mark before Godlock's extensive training starts being put to use.

Action cinema has come a long way since Woo was making A Better Tomorrow, but it's still a lot of fun seeing the old master revive the old standards. Does someone use two guns to turn a bad guy into a sieve? Of course. Is there a moment with a fluttering bird? Naturally. And as for the power of brotherhood - or just two previous foes realising in the middle of a gunfight that they can only rely on each other - it's a valuable message no matter what time of year.

But those moments are brief, little more than nods to the longtime fans. Woo is telling a story, not serving up a greatest hits show, and while this is definitely a John Woo film it's the full throttle emotions as much as the relentless and visceral violence that shows his stamp.

Put another way, this is the rare recent revenge rampage that dares to suggest that extreme violence might be a bad thing, and that murdering a whole lot of people might leave you feeling empty inside. It's that willingness to tell a story that's full of cartoon cliche bad guys and raw emotion, and not just having to shoot bad guys a dozen times to make sure they don't get back up, that makes Silent Night a classic John Woo movie.

Though there is a fair bit of that in there too.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Thanksgiving

Of all the fake trailers that were part of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez's 2007 double feature Grindhouse, the one for Thanksgiving seemed the most plausible as a feature. Not a good feature, mind you - but as another drab yet gory 80s slasher with murder on the menu it worked just fine. 

So now that director Eli Roth has finally expanded it into a full film, it's a pleasant surprise to say it's at least on par with its inspirations. And that's pretty much the only pleasant surprise that awaits anyone in the town of Plymouth, Massachusetts.

A prologue sets the scene: a year ago a shopping stampede for Thanksgiving bargains turned bloody, leaving three extremely dead and nobody charged (that's capitalism for you). Now a mysterious killer dressed up like a pilgrim is murdering those visible in a viral video of the splattered shoppers. 

You'd think the prime target would be Jessica (Nell Verlaque) the teen daughter of the death shop owner (Rick Hoffman), but it seems like the killer is saving something special for her. If you remember the depraved and deadly dinner that was the centerpiece of the trailer, you know where things are heading.

In expanding on the trailer, the faux-80s stylings are dropped, while a few subplots about internet fame and rich versus poor are mixed in without ever really going much of anywhere. This is a whodunnit slasher (think Scream), though it's hard to care all that much about that side of things - especially when even the locals don't seem all that fussed as the body count rises and the sheriff (Patrick Dempsey) isn't exactly a brains trust. 

At first it seems like that's the point: the whole town is so committed to Thanksgiving that, much like the beach town in Jaws, they don't want to face what's really going on. But as things progress it starts to feel like Roth's just more interested in the kills than the killer.

To be fair, so is the audience. On that level - which is really the only one that counts - this doesn't disappoint, though some of the more memorable moments from the trailer turn out to work better in snippet form (and a couple of them are scaled back; what worked well as a quick joke would have hit a very different note in an expanded feature film). 

Tonally this is a little shaky and the early promise of some serious satire is never really followed up on. But plenty of annoying losers die very gory deaths and that's exactly the point of this kind of film. Roth knows how to serve up a memorable holiday feast.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Five Nights at Freddy's

Five Nights at Freddy's is a great title for a video game. There's the concept right there: you've got to make it through five nights! Turn it into a movie title, and the threat becomes a promise: you're going to spend five whole nights at Freddys! Which means you're going to make it alive through at least the first four, and there goes any suspense for 4/5ths of the movie. Which, when it's a 110 minute movie, is a lot of run time to spend looking at some (intentionally) cheesy animatronic killbots.

It's the 1990s, and security guard Mike Schmidt (Josh Hutcherson) isn't exactly on a career upswing. Which is a problem as he's guardian to his younger sister Abby (Piper Rubio) and even if they don't really connect personally he's still got to pay the bills. That's looking a lot more difficult after he loses his mall job for assaulting a guy he thought was kidnapping a child (does Mike have a traumatic past that will be relevant later? You bet!) and now his aunt wants custody of Abby for those sweet, sweet government benefit checks.

So Mike is in a very vulnerable position when his somewhat offputting job advisor (Matthew Lillard, always great to see) directs him to a gig spending his nights guarding a Freddy Fazbear's Pizza place. Once a thriving child-friendly franchise where anamatronic mascots performed, it's now a creepy abandoned dump. Why does it even need a security guard? Could it be that his job isn't so much to keep the local dirtbags out, as keep what lurks within... in?

No, not really. It takes Mike a fair while to figure out what's going on - the pizza mascots are possessed and murderous - so while the killbots are racking up a body count thanks to some daytime break-ins, Mike is gradually learning the lore from local cop Vanessa Shelly (Elizabeth Lail). Turns out the place closed down back in the 80s after five children were murdered there. Could there possibly be a link to Mike's own past? Will he have to bring Abby with him to work at the worst possible time? Why is all this treated so seriously? Some of these questions (not the last one) will soon be answered.

For an idea that's already been ripped off by multiple movies (the recent Banana Splits film, the "Nicolas Cage doesn't speak" horror movie Willy's Wonderland) this plays things surprisingly straight. Presumably the fans of the extremely successful video game franchise wouldn't have it any other way; for movie-goers, the lack of decent laughs in a movie that's meant to be about cutesy robots brutally murdering people is a major weakness.

What this does have going for it is cutesy robots who are also creepy, and it's not hard to see their appeal. "See" being the important word; while visually they're impressive (and impressively sinister at times), they never really develop much personality as monsters. While there's an in-story reason for that, it's also a missed opportunity to really build on what's easily the most interesting element here.

With its mix of not-scary-enough horror and too-extensive backstory (there's an entire subplot about using lucid dreaming to try and solve a crime), this ends up feeling more like franchise maintenance than entertainment. It's a film that exists to further the brand rather than be enjoyable in its own right, something aimed entirely at pre-sold audiences - whether they might be long time fans or just a group (or cinema full) of people who think the idea of killer cuddly toys is so awesome that the actual movie is an afterthought.

Going by the US box office, there's a lot of those people out there: Five Nights at Freddy's is back in business.

- Anthony Morris

 

Review: Expend4bles

The hook with the original Expendables was simple: all your old favourite action heroes are back! Well, not all of them, but over the next couple of movies they managed to pull pretty much everyone from the 80s and 90s back onto the big screen one last time. But even if you haven't looked at a calendar lately you'd be aware that the 80s aren't getting any closer time-wise: how do you make an action sequel starring classic action heroes when they're finally too old for this shit?

If you're Expend4bles, you just leave all the oldies out of it. The series has always thrown in a few younger stars here and there, with Jason Statham as the co-lead to bring in action fans who like their stars to still be able to kick their way out of trouble. It's been almost a decade since the last film and Statham's now the only cast member left with any kind of box office clout - even series star Sylvester Stallone has moved over to TV - and this is his film in all but name.

After a middle east massacre led by bad guy Suarto (Iko Uwais) and a totally unrelated bar fight over a ring belonging to Barney (Stallone) that couldn't possibly become relevant later, the plot kicks in. A mysterious bad guy from Barney's past (codename: Ocelot) is back, and CIA handler Marsh (Andy Garcia) wants The Expendables to investigate the carnage in Libya that presumably has been going on for days considering Suarto is still driving around shooting stuff when they finally arrive.

Lee Christmas (Statham), Gunnar (Dolph Lungren, now with longer hair that the film feels needs explaining), Toll Road (Randy Couture), and newcomers Easy Day (50 Cent) and Galan (Jacob Scipio) are the ground team, while Barney stays with the plane overhead. Where is the safest place to be when Suarto and his team start blowing even more stuff up? The answer may surprise you.

After the bungled mission - turns out Suarto escaped with a trigger that'll enable Ocelot to create an atomic bomb - Christmas is on the outs and his sex buddy Gina (Megan Fox) is the new team leader. While she's off to get the trigger back, he's stuck working as a bodyguard for an online influencer while wearing his old suit from The Transporter films.

Previous films in the series sold the idea of international mercenaries traveling the globe killing people while looking like an over-the-hill bikie gang. Much of the rest of this one takes place on an old freighter in the middle of nowhere. It makes for a decent enough action location while still giving off distinct "we ran out of money" vibes, but at least it means less need for cheap-looking CGI.

The smaller scale does have some advantages. This is basically a Jason Statham (and friends) movie (Stallone sits much of it out), which means the fights are usually decent, there's a few comedy scenes that aren't completely embarrassing, and the whole thing moves forward with the bare minimum of time wasting subplots or fan service. It's nothing special, but it's been a long time since the first Expendables was a surprise hit, and seeing this kind of basic action movie on the big screen is increasingly rare.

The problem is that The Expendables franchise was never a traditional action series. Having the oldies stagger out for one last punch-up was the whole point; with the pensioners now pensioned off, all that's left is new faces delivering the same old mindless world-saving violence. 

If they're going to make Lee Christmas the star, time to latch onto the latest action trend and just set it during Christmas with a Christmas pun for a title; paint a few hand grenades to look like Christmas baubles, wrap some tinsel around a knife, and Expendables:5lay Ride is a sure-fire hit.

- Anthony Morris

Review: The Creator

Originality is an overrated virtue in movies. Big-screen storytelling is about taking us on a journey: sometimes we just want to check out the same old haunts. Despite the title, there's not a lot that feels created about The Creator. It's a mash-up collection of tropes and cliches and SF paperback cover art from a director (Gareth Edwards) best known for striking visuals and same old stories. Does that make it a bad movie? Not automatically.

In a future where very little is what it seems but all the surprises can be seen coming a mile away, Joshua (John David Washington) is a man on a mission. The development of artificial intelligence (presented via an opening retro faux-newsreel) was going fine until a nuke destroyed LA: having seen The Terminator, the US military assumed computers were making a move to wipe out humanity and decided to fight back, with Joshua at the pointy end of the spear.

While the US binned their AI (though they kept their unintelligent machines handy), New Asia became a haven for thinking software, though most of it seems to be walking around in robot bodies - there's no talking cars or smart houses. Seeing AI as a global threat, the US declared war. While they mostly fire off drone strikes from a giant suborbital platform called NOMAD, there's still room for boots on the ground - such as Joshua, who we meet on an undercover mission to ferret out the human brain behind the AI revolution.

Things go wrong, Joshua fails both at his mission and at keeping the woman he loves alive, and five years later he's a washed up drunk until the military comes calling with an offer he can't refuse. If the New Asia struggle is a Vietnam War analogue, it's Apocalypse Now time. Well, for a few minutes at least, as Joshua leads a team to a secret jungle lab where they will a): take out a ultimate AI weapon, b): kill its creator, and c): hopefully find his dead love. The twist? The ultimate weapon is (in the form of) a child, Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles), who can shut machines down with their mind.

The road trip that follows makes up in incident what it lacks in originality: there's always something happening, even if not much of it lingers. And Edwards does serve up a lot of great visuals, though they rarely generate much of a sense of the world behind them. One or two of these big background images deployed in a short film would make for powerful world-building; here they just pile up one atop the other without ever coming together to create a plausible New Asia.

That said, there are times where the haphazard approach does click. Despite being at war with the US - NOMAD is just drifting through their airspace dropping missiles, while giant US ARMY-branded tanks crush villages - New Asia doesn't seem to have any military of their own. As Joshua and Alphie flee the remains of his former team (who haven't given up on dropping Alphie into a trash compactor) and hit the road, the only obstacles are local robot cops and some Vietcong-style robot rebels, while in the cyberpunk cities life goes on. The idea that the US declared a war and the other side went "whatever" feels more futuristic than any number of hollow-headed, human-faced robots walking around.

Mash-ups can be satisfying in their own right, and eventually the emotional through-line of the story kicks in hard enough to clarify that the striking backdrops are just meant to be striking backdrops. The world of The Creator rarely feels more than 2D (the robots too often look like humans in dress up, which they are), but Washington gives a battered performance that's almost enough to make everything around him feel real through sheer gravity. 

His performance comes direct from a smaller, better film, but those big science-fiction backdrops he's standing in front of definitely have an appeal of their own.

- Anthony Morris

 

Review: Retribution

There are two ways to go with a high concept thriller. Either you stick with the concept right to the very end, or you try something new in act three and hope the audience doesn't mind. Speed is probably the best-known example of the latter, ditching the whole "there's a bomb on the bus" angle with twenty minutes to go. In Retribution, the bomb is in a car - though it turns out there's slightly more to the evil scheme than that.

Berlin-based Matt Turner (Liam Neeson) is a typical Liam Neeson character, only pushed just that little bit further. We're used to seeing him play a gruff dad who's blunt nature hides a desire to do what's right for his family; here his family barely seems an afterthought. He's all about making money for his dodgy hedge fund and his pushy boss (Matthew Modine), and if he has to take the kids (Jack Champion and Lily Aspell) to school, they'd better not get in the way of his sleazy sales calls.

Then he gets a phone call telling him there's a bomb in his car. He triggered it when he sat down, and it he gets up, the car goes boom (much like another car did at the beginning of the film). If he lets the kids out, boom. If he calls the police, boom. You get the idea: he has to do what he's told if he wants to stay alive - even if what he's being told to do seems a little more personal than you'd expect. 

Being a Liam Neeson character, it doesn't take Turner long to a): start reconnecting with his kids, and b): start working on ways out of this situation. The film - a tight 90 minutes - is basically split into thirds: the first third sets the scene, the middle is a lot of driving around trying not to set off a bomb (other drivers around are not so fortunate) even as the police zero in on him, and the final third sees him turning the tables, though there's still a few twists to come.

Efficiency is an underrated virtue in thrillers, and while there's not a lot that's especially new here, director Nimrod Antal doesn't act like he's reinventing the wheel either. Expected plot points arrive early or are skimmed  past, while the action beats are well deployed and effective. The ride is still a little bumpy, but the basic emotional through-line - why is this happening to me, how can I keep my kids safe, how long before I can get revenge - is refreshingly solid for a B-movie.

Retribution also arrests a recent decline in Neeson's action adventures, returning to a level of solid competency after a run of films that often stumbled in one way or another. Perhaps responding to this, Neeson's performance is a notch above his action norm, making clear Turner's confusion, his fear for his kids, and his nagging sense that maybe he did do something to deserve all this. 

Also, in a development that shouldn't be surprising but actually is, it turns out the Berlin police are both competent and highly motivated to stop someone driving around like a madman with a bomb in his car. No doubt this was set in Europe for financial reasons, but having Turner up against a police department that won't just fire a couple thousand rounds into the car and call it a day definitely helps this run longer than your average Mercedes commercial.

- Anthony Morris

Review: The Nun II

 

One of the best things about the various horror universes that have spun off from the work of James Wan - you know, The Conjuring (nine films and counting), Insidious, the Saw movies - is that they're very committed to their continuity while making it clear to audiences that they don't really have to follow any of it. They're always full of moments that feel like they're connected to previous films but if you don't remember how or why, it doesn't really matter: the backstory never gets in the way of the jump scares.

So here goes. The Nun II is the sequel to The Nun, which was a spin-off from The Conjuring 2 (The Conjuring is the franchise that also gave us the evil doll movie Annabelle). Do you need to know any of this to enjoy The Nun's comeback? No you do not. The Nun is a demon who likes freaking people out by looking like an evil nun: there, you're up to speed.

The Nun II hits the ground running in a way that makes it seem like this particular demon is not going to be messing around when it comes to racking up a body count, but don't worry - once things settle down the Nun gets back in the habit (sorry) of tormenting its victims in the kind of jump scare-packed fashion that enables a film like this to run longer than half an hour. 

As for the scares themselves? They're usually decent concepts well executed - there's one involving a magazine stand that's a high point - but they're rarely truly scary. You get why the people in the film are freaking out; in the cinema, not so much.

Story-wise, after seemingly defeating the Nun in the first film, Sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga) has retired to a quiet nunnery where she can spend her days looking enigmatic while the older nuns recount the plot of the first film then add "and nobody knows where the Sister who helped defeat the demon is today". 

At least she has the rebellious (well, she smokes, which isn't really all that rebellious in the 1950s when this is set) Sister Debra (Storm Reid) to hang out with. And then she gets a call from the Church hierarchy.  Looks like The Nun is tearing a path across Europe and only one extremely expendable sister can stop its reign of terror.

Meanwhile on the other side of the continent, fellow first film survivor Frenchie (Jonas Bloquet) - who is actually from Romania, but is now back in France - is charming both the students and the teachers at a girls boarding school. It used to be a monastery and no spoilers but there is a lot of extremely heavy-handed exposition in this film so you really don't have to worry about missing something that'll be important later. Unfortunately for Frenchie, evil seems to have followed him to the school and it's brought a lot of jump scares with it.

The two plots run parallel for a while just to drag things out, with Sisters Irene and Debra trying to figure out where the Nun is heading and what it wants (turns out it's torching priests and killing kids for a reason), while at the boarding school it rapidly becomes obvious that not all is well with Frenchie. Eventually everyone meets up and the film switches from jump scares (which, in case you missed it, this has a lot of) to full on demonic activity. 

If you're expecting any kind of set limits or clear parameters on the Nun's evil powers, forget it: one character comes back from the dead but isn't really a zombie, while another monster is seemingly summoned out of a stained glass window. If it's scary or creepy, then the Nun can probably do it; on the flip side, if the story requires a human to fight against demonic possession or escape certain death, they can probably manage it. Basically, it all evens out.

As a demon-themed thrill ride this has it's good points. Farmiga makes for a compelling and plausibly fragile lead, and the fact that pure evil here lurks inside the only male character (though some of the school students are pretty nasty bullies) is no doubt no coincidence. Director Michael Chaves (a Conjuring-verse veteran) eventually builds enough of a convincingly intense mood towards the end to justify proceedings, but there's not a lot here that'll inspire nightmares.

That said, it probably doesn't pay to think too long about how this occasionally feels a little too much like propaganda for the Catholic Church. It's a movie set in the 1950s where agents of the Church go into a boarding school to save kids from evil; there'd be some parts of the world where that might be harder to believe than the idea of a demonic nun who makes people burst into flames just by looking at them.

- Anthony Morris