Oh Ho No: VIOLENT NIGHT

Violent Night is for people who still think it makes them sound interesting to pretend they just noticed Die Hard is a Christmas movie. This hard-R actioner’s one innovation is to have the real Santa Claus (David Harbour) interrupt a home invasion. Alas, this is a noxiously pedestrian effort, lousy with gore and four-letter-words and filled with the unappealing, poorly sketched characters in the most routine plotting. It wants to be winking and transgressive. It tries really, really hard. How boring. It takes a real misanthrope or outsider to understand the undercurrents possible in a dark Christmas story. Put a Christmas Evil or Black Christmas or Dial Code Santa on and you’ll find a cozy Yuletide scumminess in harsher-edged stories of queasy intimate despair and real bloody danger. There’s always something bittersweet and sad about the holidays, a time to reflect on a fall from childhood innocence and domestic happiness. Even a more monstrous take—Rare Exports or Gremlins—plays up the Charlie Brown Christmas melancholy as it excavates clever ways to set scares against the setting. This one, with all its blandly blocked studio gloss, is just dull. It takes its idea’s surface and resolutely refuses to dig even one centimeter into its implications, senselessly colliding stupid fantasy with gooey gunplay over and over. And the thing stretches that thinness over two whole hours. Talk about a lump of coal.

The resulting forced frivolity leaves only mirthless misery where the action and comedy should be. It finds a horrible wealthy family trapped in their mansion on Christmas Eve when a paramilitary heist squad (led by John Leguizamo) shows up to take millions out of their vault. Turns out the family runs a black-ops contractor company and stole their stash from the US government by claiming it disappeared in the Middle East. Since we met the sweater-clad family (which includes Edi Patterson and Cam Gigandet and Beverly D’Angelo) vulgarly sniping at each other around a crackling fire, we aren’t exactly predisposed to like these crooked people. But the villains are never sympathetic either. And the movie lacks the moral or political clarity to actually make something of all that. So it’s just nasty for nasty’s sake. That’s an ain’t-I-a-stinker? move that runs straight into the movie’s actual attempts to make this all about The Spirit of Christmas. The horrible family has one bright spot: an innocent little girl (Leah Brady) brought by her reluctant mother (Alexis Louder). The tot still believes in Santa, and that belief in him will help save them all once Saint Nick himself ends up coming down the chimney and reluctantly reconnects with his Viking roots. Its approach to Claus lore is typically charmless. To see the jolly old elf himself sledgehammer and electrocute and behead the intruders, is, well, something, I suppose. This is all tiresomely tedious, and director Tommy Wirkola (Dead Snow), working from a screenplay by the Sonic the Hedgehog guys, lacks the chops to really make this mess of intentions cohere. The result is an ugly mixture of cringing empty holiday sentimentality and nasty artless violence.

Brother & Sister Act: HANSEL & GRETEL: WITCH HUNTERS

I’m sure you remember the story of Hansel and Gretel, two little kids, brother and sister, who get lost in the woods and find their way to a cabin made of candy. Inside sits a witch, ready to fatten them up and cook them for dinner. They manage to burn her in her own oven and escape. And that’s that. It’s a nice story, isn’t it? What Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters supposes is that this childhood encounter left the kids with a talent for slaying sorceresses, a talent they take on the road, roaming the countryside from village to village, peddling their ability to liberate towns from the terror of witchcraft in their midst. We pick up with them as adults, walking into a village that has been hit by a string of kidnappings, youngsters spirited away by shadowy magic into the blackest part of the forest never to be heard from again. Hansel and Gretel take the case, promising to slay the witch(es) involved and return the kids to their parents.

Writer-director Tommy Wirkola (of the lame Nazi zombie half-comedy Dead Snow) came up with an inventive twist on a Grimm tale and then stopped there, wanly elaborating upon a simple story until it becomes yet another dour, emotionless action movie. It charmed me at first, in its opening minutes at least, but all too quickly became plodding and predictable, running through its repetitive motions. The violence is splashily over-the-top, giving the characters rapid-fire crossbows, heavy firearms and the standard hyper-competence in murkily choreographed, supposedly improvisatory hand-to-hand combat. Witches are slashed apart in gruesome ways and return the favor by casting spells that cause men to eat bugs and explode or get stepped upon by a troll, which sends what looks like grape jelly splattering under the beast’s boot. And not a bit of it is exciting or involving in the slightest.  

The plot proceeds dumbly and dutifully through one of the simplest, most emotionally and creatively uncomplicated possible versions of this concept. As the adult Hansel and Gretel, Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton, who are generally appealing actors even in dry material, appear to be going through the motions dispirited and listless. They are without chemistry of any kind, between each other or anyone else in the cast and the movie calls upon them to do very little with what amounts to nothing more than cardboard action stereotypes dressed up in fairy tale drag. Little creative touches – Hansel suffers from diabetes as a result of eating too much of that witch’s house way back when – seem dropped in out of nowhere and come to mean very little in the scheme of things.

Filling out the rest of the cast is a nice group of supporting actors, from Famke Janssen as the Big Bad Witch to Peter Stormare as a skeptical sheriff and Thomas Mann as a village teen with an exceedingly understandable crush on Gretel. Their contributions are nonstarters as well, ground under by the empty spectacle. It’s a goofy movie that refuses to overtly comment upon its own goofiness while at the same time carefully avoiding taking itself seriously. It’s an odd, uncommitted stance for such potentially enjoyable trash to take. As is, it plays like someone went into the editing room and scrupulously snipped out every bit of humor and excitement, leaving only an 88-minute husk of a good idea, a one-joke movie that never even finds the energy to tell it with any skill.