72% on Rotten Tomatoes (out of 164 reviews)
Runtime: 112 minutes
Directed by: Tommy Wirkola
Starring: David Harbour, John Leguizamo, Alex Hassell, Alexis Louder, Leah Brady, Beverly D'Angelo
From: Universal
More like a “no no no” for me rather than a “ho ho ho”.
It's never the intent whenever the occasion arises that I have an unpopular film opinion to irritate others or even to make anyone shake their heads in befuddlement. It's usually the case that I wish to feel the love that others have for a motion picture, and it would have been nice to enjoy a wacky premise where Santa Claus wrecks dudes who try to rob an uber-wealthy family.
Instead, what was given to us was the worst sort of present imaginable, at least for my tastes. A drunken A-hole Santa who barfs on someone a few minutes in ends up stuck in the compound of an uber-wealthy family who are comically over the top in how awful and disgusting they are; only the Black mother and the mixed-race 9 year old girl are even tolerable. Even worse people try to rob them in a subplot that is a just a lame riff on Die Hard. Then again, the movie directly references a popular Christmas classic and in the final act directly reenacts it in an R-rated version, which didn't make it “clever” to me.
Heck, Kris Kringle here is kind of a goof for the first two acts, not really dominating his foes and spending a lot of time chit-chatting instead of trying to kill the foes or even really help the girl except for dialogue. Finally Santa lays waste to SOB's... usually in low lighting so it wasn't that satisfying to me. Finding most of the characters intolerable, most of the “humor” falling completely flat for me, the “plot twists” just made me groan, and all the eye-rolling sentiments the movie had to offer made this rather painful, not to mention incredibly disappointing. They tried to explain a bit how Santa exists in this universe; it didn't make complete sense yet that was the least of the film's problems.
Heck, they showed Kringle attempting to do some magic and it was like we had prior context for whatever the F he was trying to do when in actuality we didn't; only later did we see that act done successfully but that was one of many examples where Violent Night just turned me off. Why couldn't this have been fun for me instead of smug and full of douchiness? Later in December I'll check out at least one traditional Christmas tale.
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