Rating: B+
Dir: John Woo
Star: Joel Kinnaman, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Kid Cudi, Harold Torres
Know what the saddest thing is? That the poster touts this as being “From the producer of John Wick.” Really? Rather than advertising that it’s “By the director of Face-Off, Mission: Impossible II and Hard Boiled, motherfuckers!” With all due respect to Basil Iwanyk, I don’t think his name exactly gets people running to the cinema. I guess it indicates how far Woo’s stock has fallen. It has been twenty years since his last film in Hollywood, the underwhelming Paycheck. But he’s back, with an audacious and thoroughly divisive entry, which feels like it was made as the result of a drunken wager. “Betcha can’t make a whole movie without dialogue, Johnny.” Challenge accepted.
It’s the story of Brian Godlock (Kinnaman), whose son is killed by a stray gang bullet. His initial effort to take revenge gets him a bullet in the head throat, though he recovers. He becomes focused solely on his vengeance, spending a whole year training towards it, alienating and eventually losing the relationship with his wife, Saya (Moreno) in the process. Freed by the constraints of the legal system, he’s able to accumulate evidence he can pass to the investigating detective (Cudi). But Brian’s aim is far more direct, and clear from point he writes KILL THEM ALL on his calendar in the December 24th spot. Put it this way, the gangster who shot him, Playa (Torres) needn’t worry about buying Christmas presents.
Just search online and you’ll find a lot of people clearly hate this. Fair enough. It’s clearly not your normal action movie, and as a result, is not going to be for everyone. But it’s a novel twist, something only a veteran like Woo could hope to pull off. Besides, I’d rather have too little dialogue than Tarantino diarrhoea, especially in an action movie where the “Show, don’t tell” mantra should be particularly true. This proves talking is not essential, albeit helped by a plot that admittedly errs on the side of simplistic: man takes revenge. Still, Kinnaman does a good job of putting over the almost unimaginable trauma of losing a child, though Saya seems oddly unaffected by it. [Someone should do a movie about a husband and wife vigilante couple]
We are here for the stylish cinematic violence, and Woo delivers, despite a worrying lack of slo-mo doves. The gang members are flat-out terrible shots, but it’s inaccuracy necessary to the plot, so we’ll forgive it. Playa is not your typical cholo either. Next Christmas I’ll be imitating him by taking heroin with a heavily tatted-up Latina goth chick [memo to Chris: start on the ink, stat], while dressed as Santa and listening to Hocico in my lair, decorated with gigantic Christmas balls. It’s all arguably mad as a hatter in many ways, yet I found it unquestionably entertaining, and certainly unique. I’ll take both of those any day, over all the films which are too scared to try anything out of the ordinary.