Violent Night (2022)
Directed by Tommy Wirkola
When a team of mercenaries breaks into a wealthy family compound on Christmas Eve, taking everyone inside hostage, the team isn’t prepared for a surprise combatant: Santa Claus is on the grounds, and he’s about to show why this Nick is no saint.
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What critics compared Violent Night to
While Tommy Wirkola’s Violent Night draws inspiration from Christmas films like Die Hard and Home Alone , both of which are referenced throughout, it bears more resemblance to that recent comedy sketch, only without any of the self-awareness about how the cynicism of films like Joker has become played out.
“Christmas Vacation” is echoed in the casting of Beverly D’Angelo as the matriarch; the kid in question is a “Home Alone” fan, so there’s a lengthy (and gorier, and death-ier) riff on its slapstick home invasion sequence; Leguizamo gets a “Gremlins”-style monologue about why he hates Christmas; and the central family drama, with worthless adult kids angling for their mother’s money even while they’re being held hostage, recalls “The Ref.”
This is a movie in the same spirit as Die Hard and Home Alone (with direct references to the latter), pitting the good guys vs. the bad guys on Christmas Eve.
Indeed, “Violent Night” is a bloody and downright ludicrous romp that has no business being this fun with the obvious (and appropriate) comparison belonging to “Die Hard” and “Home Alone,” but this heavily R-rated Christmas themed actioner knows exactly what it is and isn’t afraid to be extra naughty.
His approach makes for a hyper-self-aware, modern redux of the character in a film that pays as much homage to films like Deadpool as it does to Die Hard and Home Alone.
One particularly inspired sequence delivers what Home Alone could, were it to be given a more adult rating.
Violent Night, Sisu, and Nobody have all proved that audiences will always root for the implausible badass with right on their side, and that’s true again in Love Hurts.
Whether it’s Nobody or 2022’s Violent Night, which imagined a saintly Santa Claus who was once a Viking warrior, the company’s relatively low-budget projects often get their laughs from the juxtaposition of ostensibly kindly individuals engaged in hyper-violent fight scenes.
…coming from the producers who gave us Violent Night…
…an action-packed, genre-blending rollercoaster from 87North, the studio behind Nobody and Violent Night…
…director Jonathan Eusebio’s main background is stunts/fight/martial arts coordinator in some of the biggest action movies like John Wick, Black Panther, Doctor Strange, and Violent Night, among others.
Director Jonathan Eusebio, a talented fight coordinator with titles like The Fall Guy and Violent Night and assorted John Wicks to his credit, doesn’t give the action any spontaneity or grace or visceral pizzazz.
Death of a Unicorn was a delightful, if slightly gory surprise, reminding me a little of Ready or Not (2019) and Violent Night (2022) with its treatment of the 0.01% without going fully swinging the other way with a proletariat “for the people” message.
With films like Violent Night (2022), Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), and Love Hurts (2025), it feels like a concerted effort to get the stand-alone action comedy with no superheroes attached back on its feet.
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Christmas bloodbaths like Violent Night provide an April Fool’s Day opportunity to play with holiday trappings…
While hosting Saturday Night Live in 2019, David Harbour played a human version of Sesame Street ’s Oscar the Grouch in a parody trailer that poked fun at Todd Phillips’s Joker and Hollywood’s infatuation with pumping out dark and often archly ironic films about established pop-culture characters.