The trailer for John Woo’s Silent Night promises a wordless, action-packed holiday
Joel Kinnaman is out for revenge without the use of his voice in a new movie that aims to live up to its name
It’s Christmas in October because John Woo has finally come back to Hollywood. For the first time since 2003’s Paycheck, Woo is in the U.S. with a pistol in each hand and a flock of doves fluttering around him. His latest Silent Night promises a return to form for the master of action movies and a challenge for him. Simply put: The title is a dare.
Silent Night stars Joel Kinnaman, a tormented father who watched his young son gunned down amid gang violence on Christmas Eve. Left without a son or a voice, which was damaged in the crossfire, Kinnaman hits the streets for a wordless revenge thriller helmed by one of the greats. Woo’s style is all over this trailer, with ridiculous car chases, immediate and unconventional camera dynamics, and a poetic eye for absurdity, anger, and violence.
A silent action movie isn’t Woo’s only challenge this year. The legendary director has reportedly started production on a remake of one of his seminal works: 1989’s The Killer. Though we expect the title will change because David Fincher’s upcoming hitman thriller has the same name, the remake is a Parisian “Peacock Original” inspired by the work of Jean-Pierre Melville, the influential director of such classics as Le Cercle Rouge and Le Samouraï, according to producer Charles Roven.
“[John Woo] was motivated by the Jean-Pierre Melville new wave gangster movies that Jean-Paul Belmondo and Alain Delon starred in, and those were obviously shot in Paris. And so he just became motivated about doing an homage to The Killer in Paris because he was inspired by those movies,” Roven told The Hollywood Reporter. “He also came up with an idea to make it fresh. In the original Killer, the great Chinese male actor Chow Yun-fat played the killer, but the killer in this movie is played by Nathalie Emmanuel. And by changing the dynamic to a woman, the storyline became quite different. So, while it’s an homage to his movie, it’s definitely not a remake. There’s a lot of original content in it that’s different from the first movie.”
We apologize to Mr. Woo for referring to the film as a “remake.”
Silent Night opens in theaters on December 1.