Die Hard is a Christmas Movie in ‘Violent Night’

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Rating: 3.5/5.0

CHICAGO – David Harbour is part Bad Santa, part John McClane in this yuletide spin on Die Hard which never takes itself the slightest bit seriously. It’s a spiked Christmas cocktail that’s surprisingly light on its feet. So Here comes Santa Claus with a sledge hammer ready to dispatch some North Pole justice to bad guys on his naughty list.

Harbour plays the legendary Kris Kringle as part burn out, part bad ass. When he first meet him, he’s taking an extended break on his Christmas Eve rounds, drowning his holiday sorrows in a pint of bitter in an English pub. He’s tired of the grind, tired of the kids who don’t believe, especially the ones who don’t appreciate what they’ve been given and just want more. Santa needs to shotgun a beer just to get through Christmas Eve these days.

Violent Night
Photo credit: Universal Pictures

We flash forward to a year later and he’s just popped down the chimney of a rich family’s estate and is helping himself to some milk and cookies, when a group of terrorists seize the house, killing the staff and take the family hostage. The family is led by foul mouthed matriarch Gertrude Lightstone (Beverly D’Angelo) who clearly seems to revel in the opportunity to swear like a sailor.

The rest of the family are poorly defined vapid idiots, save for Gertrude’s eight-year-old granddaughter Trudy (Leah Brady), who still believes. Santa’s reindeer get spooked by the gunfire, leaving the Jolly Elf to fend for himself. Fittingly in a movie like this, the psychos all have Christmas themed code names like Gingerbread, Peppermint and Krampus, and they are led by Scrooge (John Leguizamo), who is out to recover a stash of 300 million dollars in the family vault. Trudy escapes and contacts Santa by radio to call for help while she sets up her Home-Alone-style booby traps in the attic.

David Harbour seems to be having a ball playing Santa, and gets laughs out of moments both big and small. I particularly liked a moment when Santa sniffs out homemade cookies, and gives a disapproving yuck upon finding out that the now warm milk left out for him is skim … this Santa knows if you’ve been sleeping, but also where your liquor cabinet is. Throughout the film we get hints at Santa’s former life as some kind of a Viking warrior who loved to smack skulls, so soon enough the big fat pack upon his back is filled not with goodies but with a sledgehammer. His Santa has tats, knows how to stitch up his wounds with wrapping paper, and uses a Christmas stocking as a weapon to knock someone senseless.

Santa (David Harbour) is Tied Up this Holiday in ‘Violent Night’
Photo credit: Universal Pictures

The film is extremely violent and gory, and pulls out every Christmas cliché in the book, but somehow it actually kinda works. At times it ventures into sappy saccharine territory, but there’s always another act of Yuletide mayhem to get the ho ho ho’s coming. It’s hard to take a scene where the terrorists threaten to smash a hostage’s junk in a Nutcracker device seriously. Santa uses his particular set of skills to dispatch an entire army of commandos with among other things a set of ice skates and a snow blower. One terrorist reaches his end with a tree topper star to the eye, while another gets the point from a large icicle.

“Violent Night” is no piece of great art by any means, but it does what it promises to do. So if you ever wanted to see Santa dispatch someone on his naughty list by stabbing them with a candy cane, then the Christmas gift is the movie for you.

By SPIKE WALTERS Contributor HollywoodChicago.com spike@hollywoodchicago.com