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One of the finest jokes in “Scrooged,” the occasionally imperfect but egregiously underappreciated 1988 Bill Murray parody of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, debuted with a fake commercial trailer right at the start. In the film “The Night the Reindeer Died,” which had the cheerily corny title, terrorists try to take over the North Pole, but Lee Majors saves the day by shooting them down while the man in the red suit reminds him that he is being a good boy this year. It was admittedly a one-joke premise, but it served as a distillation of the craven lengths that network television programmers go to in order to attract viewers during the Yuletide season. In this case, they took a made-for-TV ripoff of the typical Chuck Norris vehicle of the time and crudely applied a thick seasonal glaze to the tip. However, since the joke only ran for about two minutes, it was finished before it could start to outstay its welcome. It also just so happened to be quite humorous.
Now comes “Violent Night,” a movie that seems to have been made specifically to answer the question of what a full-length adaptation of “The Night the Reindeer Died” might have been like, enhanced by excessive carnage that would have been unthinkable on television back then. “Violent Night” was written by Pat Casey and Josh Miller, and it was directed by Tommy Wirkola. The end result, perhaps not unexpectedly, is a fairly boring cinematic piece of coal that tries fruitlessly to drag out its one-joke idea over the course of 101 minutes in an attempt to establish itself as a new alternative holiday classic. Instead, “Violent Night” mostly wastes David Harbour’s sincere portrayal as the Man in Red while being about as fascinating as hearing people debate whether “Die Hard” is a Christmas movie or not (it isn’t, FYI).
As the movie begins, the extremely wealthy, influential, and dysfunctional Lightstone family has gathered at Gertrude’s (Beverly D’Angelo) vast estate to celebrate—to use the term promiscuously—the holidays. Only Jason’s adorable moppet daughter Trudy (Leah Brady) appears to still be in the holiday spirit, despite her mother’s hateful daughter Alva (Edi Patterson), hateful son Bertrude (Alexander Elliot), and her idiot actor boyfriend (Cam Gigandet) openly courting her favor. Her son Jason (Alex Hassell) and his estranged wife Linda (Alexis Louder) are also trying to resolve their issues. However, the family squabbling soon gives way to violence when a bunch of armed robbers led by a man known only as Scrooge (John Leguizamo) show up to steal $300 million that they think Gertrude has secretly acquired and hidden away in a safe that is purportedly impenetrable.
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Santa, who is portrayed in this scene as being equally drunk and self-hating and considering ending his holiday duties after one final run, happens to be in the house during all of this and ends up becoming trapped inside when his reindeer take off during the first mayhem. He discovers Trudy is a star on his lovely list despite his initial desire to go away. It leads to several scenes in which he gruesomely dispatches the various bad guys using everything from a sledgehammer to a snow blower to a Christmas star tree topper jabbed into someone’s eyeball. He decides to get himself together and rescue her, using the skills for dispensing savage violence that he developed in his pre-Santa days. Trudy, on the other hand, employs the booby trap-building abilities she learned from watching “Home Alone” to repel the assailants in similarly horrible methods.
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The majority of “Violent Night” is made up of snippets taken from other recent holiday movies. Most obviously, it aims to be a cross between “Die Hard,” which was already discussed, and “Home Alone.” The film’s depiction of Santa Claus, who is shown flying off on his sleigh while projectile vomiting on a helpless victim during the pre-credit opening sequence, will undoubtedly bring to mind Billy Bob Thornton’s portrayal of “Bad Santa.” Straight out of “The Ref,” a dysfunctional family reunion is disrupted by criminals. Though her role is a 180-degree departure from the kind and loving mother she played in “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation,” D’Angelo’s presence acts as a living reminder of the film. Even the idea of Santa taking on evildoers in a brutal manner was done a few years ago in the bizarre film “Fatman,” in which Mel Gibson’s portrayal of Santa takes on an assassin hired by a monstrously entitled brat who objected to receiving a lump of coal.
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Not the film’s unoriginal premise, but rather how little is done with it, is the issue with “Violent Night.” Santa killing bad guys with violence is a one-joke notion that could have been developed into something intriguing, perhaps by employing graphic physical violence to comment on the emotional brutality that Christmas classics like “A Christmas Carol” and “It’s a Wonderful Life” specialize in. Instead, Wirkola is willing to continue the same joke about Santa killing bad guys in gory ways, which rapidly becomes old (and this is an unquestionably hard-R movie). Even that might have worked as a bloody black comedy on some basic level, but the movie then clumsily attempts sentimentality near the conclusion by asking us to care about the outcomes of the most unpleasant family members. The fact that Santa Claus only uses his special abilities against one of the attackers at a single time and that kill is the only one that is remembered thereafter makes “Violent Night” seem strangely reluctant to fully explore the idea that he is the one distributing the violence.
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Harbour’s performance is “Violent Night’s” lone saving grace. His persona is essentially a farce, like the rest of the movie, but he commits to it admirably the entire time, whether checking off the new things on his naughty list or interacting with Trudy via walkie-talkies. His performance here is the one sweet plum in the middle of an otherwise sour film pudding, even though he might not replace Edmund Gwenn as the ideal movie Santa any time soon.
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