Season’s beatings galore in yuletide bust-up

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This article was published 01/12/2022 (754 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Take Home Alone. Ratchet up the violence, so that booby traps can kill.

Now layer in another plot lifted from Miracle on 34th Street, in which a man claiming to be Santa Claus goes to bat — quite literally — for a little girl whose faith in Christmas is shaken by family issues: her newly separated parents.

That’s Violent Night in a nutcrackered nutshell. It’s a Christmas movie for John Wick fans, produced by 87North, a company founded by Wick co-director David Leitch and Kelly McCormick. (Specializing in state-of-the-art fight films, 87North shot both this film and the Bob Odenkirk vehicle Nobody right here in Winnipeg.)

Scripted by Pat Casey and Josh Miller (Sonic the Hedgehog), this seasonal horror/action/comedy layers in lots of other filmic references, especially to the Die Hard franchise, to the extent that it damn near qualifies as a parody.

Instead of Nakatomi Plaza, welcome to the Lightstone family compound in snowy Connecticut. The Lightstones may as well be kin to the Roy family in Succession, headed by the hyper-abrasive matriarch Gertrude (Beverly D’Angelo), a parent accustomed to keeping son Jason (Alex Hassell) and daughter Alva (Edi Patterson) under her immaculately manicured thumb.

That pressure is wearing on Jason in particular, as his marriage to his wife Linda (Alexis Louder) is suffering, to the considerable distress of innocent daughter Trudy (Leah Brady).

Everybody gets a rude awakening with the Christmas Eve invasion of a desperado calling himself Scrooge (John Leguizamo), who has inserted a team of ruthless mercenaries into the compound in search of hundreds of millions in treasure that Gertrude has stashed in the basement.

But in this instance, the fly in the ointment, the monkey in the wrench, is none other than Santa Claus (David Harbour), caught unawares while enjoying a snack of homemade cookies and Gertude’s 100-year-old Scotch.

As we learn in the film’s opening scene, Santa is himself suffering a little seasonal distress, wrought by the overarching avarice of the season. He seems on the verge of throwing in his sack and calling it quits.

But the peril faced by little Trudy compels Santa to get in touch with his primitive former self, a greedy, violent Viking warrior. Santa prepares to mete out coal-sized lumps to these psychopathic interlopers.

Director Tommy Wirkola was well-chosen for the assignment, not just because he handles mayhem with imagination (see his Norwegian Dead Snow films) but also because he has had some experience spiking children’s stories with slugs of baroque violence (Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters).

Even so, this movie’s sleigh is weighted down with dozens of film references, big, nasty action set pieces and big, sloppy goops of sentiment. It’s practically a miracle he can get the thing aloft at all.

In that, the film’s MVP is certainly Harbour (Stranger Things). He manages to sync up the character’s oppositional qualities — sympathetic warmth and cold cruelty — into a package that doesn’t look like it was gift-wrapped by a toddler. He also has a gift for growling the most obvious one-liners — “Santa Claus is coming to town,” he threatens Leguizamo over a walkie-talkie — and making them genuinely funny.

He’s so good, the movie practically falls apart when he’s not on camera, notwithstanding some funny contributions by Patterson and Cam Gigandet, playing Patterson’s gold-digging, would-be action star boyfriend. (One senses there’s a great inside joke being told here by 87North’s action maestros.)

Local talent on display includes notably slick costume design by Laura DeLuca. An abundance of local actors are seen right from the start, in the movie’s England-set preamble, which features John B. Lowe as a department store Santa and Marina Stephenson Kerr as a bartender (the recipient of the film’s first gross-out gag).

Ray Strachan plays a kind sentry, and Stephanie Sy is an ominously silent computer-hacking minion named Sugarplum, in addition to numerous stunt performers.

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