In short: Silent Night (2023)

Brian (Joel Kinnaman) loses his little son in a drive-by shooting. His unsuccessful attempt at doing a spur of the moment bit of vigilantism leaves him badly hurt and without a voice box. The now silent protagonist starts on a course of a lot of wordless emoting. During this he ruins his marriage by focussing on training up for some better vigilantism instead of recognizing he might not be the only one grieving here.

Once he’s ready, he’s going to murder a whole lot of gang members coming up on a Christmas Eve climax.

It’s nice that John Woo uses his latest stint in the West to try his hand at a formal experiment. However, the film’s high concept that an unspeaking protagonist means practically nobody else is speaking either never feels organic in the film as it plays out. Worse, the self-inflicted wordlessness undermines Woo’s ability to give the melodrama that always was part and parcel of his films beside the action the proper emotional weight. Turns out you can only show a perfectly game Kinnaman smashing furniture and murdering people as an expression of deep emotions so many times.

This leaves the action to carry everything here, and even though Woo clearly hasn’t lost his ability to show people getting shot, mauled, and so on in various exciting ways, the action does lack the kind of anchor dialogue and the kind of more complex characterisation that comes with it should have provided. Conceptually, the action sequences suffer from a certain video game quality – rather fitting to a silent protagonist, to be fair – that robs them of the impact really good action cinema is supposed to have.

Here, the escalation in violence feels less like a part of the film’s dramatic engine but as if Woo would drag Kinnaman into a new level in a third person shooter.

The Christmas gimmick, by the way, is absolutely wasted.

In short: Sympathy for the Devil (2023)

A man we’ll only ever really know as The Driver (Joel Kinnaman) is just on his way to the hospital where his wife is in heavy labour. He’s rather nervous, for a first birth some years ago did go sadly. Unexpectedly, the Driver is carjacked by a guy we’ll just call The Passenger (Nicolas Cage). The Passenger is a bit of a ranting, raving maniac, supposedly only threatening the Driver with death and violence to get a ride from him, but it quickly becomes clear that he hasn’t chosen his victim randomly. The Passenger seems to test and prod the Driver, searching for certain reactions whose nature will become clear during the course of the movie.

Eventually, during a climactic scene in a diner, all else will become clear as well.

How much you’ll like, or even just tolerate, Yuval Adler’s Sympathy for the Devil will very much depend on your love or tolerance for Nicolas Cage in his all-out mode, when neck muscles tense, eyes bug, and expressions become barely human contortions, while dialogue spews and spits forth as by a man possessed by something nasty. Me, I could watch doing Cage this sort of thing for hours. Over the years, Cage’s very particular sense for being larger than life has grown to mean a lot to me, and he’s delivering that in spades here.

He’s not doing it pointlessly or without purpose, though, and one of Sympathy’s specific joys for me is to watch his interplay with Kinnaman’s demonstrative normalcy, what it suggests about the characters and what it actually means once the plot has run its course. I really can’t overstate how important Kinnaman’s performance here is, his ability to not get drowned out by what Cage does, despite having to use an acting approach that’s the exact opposite for the film to make sense.

Adler’s direction is also very strong indeed, not just because I’m a sucker for prettily shot neon night ride movies (though I am), but because he actually copes with Cage’s performance and makes use of it for the film, emphasising or decreasing the loudness of Cage in the appropriate moments. Not an easy task, I would assume. He’s also rather great at creating a classic suspense scene. when needed. The diner climax is as good as this sort of thing gets, edited to a perfect rhythm and breathless in its sense of threat, violence, and its feel of transgression.

So, for anyone who doesn’t actively hate Cage (and really, are you sure you’re at the right place here?), this might turn out to be a fantastic thriller.

In short: Robocop (2014)

Well, for the remake of a much-loved classic, José Padilha’s re-do of Verhoeven’s magnum opus isn’t too horrible. At least it gets the most important basic for any remake of this kind right and doesn’t try to be exactly like the original but newer, and so really needn’t be held up to a direct comparison.

For the first hour or so, I even thought the film’s political and social ideas were rather interesting and actually contemporary, but the final third sees things breaking down more or less completely, with nothing of what’s going on making any sense at all: thematically, the film completely loses its way (or rather, seems to have lost any wish to talk about anything interesting anymore), character-wise nothing anyone but Murphy does has any connection to the things they supposedly want, and instead follows the old rule of “Why? It’s in the script!”. Dramatically, it becomes all very confused and generic. It certainly doesn’t help here that the finale is understandably – this being a big budget Hollywood movie - action-heavy, and action really isn’t the film’s strong suit throughout its running time. The action may be fast and very very loud but it also isn’t terribly interesting or exciting to watch, because it’s – like the production design – so shiny and glossy and slick I found myself more involved in thinking about the number of people who must have been working hard putting in all these digital reflections, and how many cleaning people every public and private building in this world must employ, than in feeling much adrenaline flowing. Which isn’t exactly what you want from a SF action film, particularly not once it has stopped thinking because it is too busy shooting.


The solid first hour – also full of really good big acting by Gary Oldman, Michael Keaton and Samuel L. Jackson – is absolutely worth watching, but I think watching only that and making up one’s own ending is the best way to go with Robocop.

Run All Night (2015)

For a decade or some, Jimmy Conlon (Liam Neeson) worked as best friend and private hitman for New York gangster boss Shawn Maguire (Ed Harris), earning himself the charming nickname of “The Gravedigger”. Now, Jimmy’s old, frequently drunk and wracked with guilt for all the people he murdered. His job, and what he thinks his particular set of abilities says about him as a man and as a human being, also cost him the relationship with his son, Michael (Joel Kinnaman), and anyone else he ever loved apart from Shawn.

Michael – a failed boxer turned limousine driver – wants nothing whatsoever to do with his father. This state of affairs has to change when he witnesses Shawn’s son Danny (Boyd Holbrook) – just as violent as his father but clearly lacking all control and finesse – murdering an Albanian drug dealer. Despite Danny’s worst efforts of getting rid of the witness, Michael escapes with his life. When Shawn calls Jimmy to talk things out, things seem set to die down without any further corpses, but Danny goes over his father’s head to kill Michael anyway. Jimmy has no choice but to shoot him to protect his own son.

Shawn is very displeased, at once putting all his men on finding and murdering Michael and his family (preferably in front of Jimmy), and Jimmy himself. Things are particularly hairy because “among his men” also means quite a few cops. Shawn also manipulates the evidence for the dead dealers to point towards Michael, which takes care of the honest cops too. He’s his father’s son, after all, right? Well, there is the somewhat more thoughtful – and certainly absolutely honest as proven by his hounding Jimmy for years – Detective John Harding (Vincent D’Onofrio) who just might believe Michael’s story, but a policeman has to go where the evidence points him.

In the following hours, Jimmy will do anything to protect his son, perhaps finding a kind of redemption even though he has to fall back into his worst self.

The even mildly genre-savvy reader will obviously have noticed that Jaume Collet-Serra’s crime action thriller lacks any original bones, starting from a well-known set-up, with well-known character types, going through a well-known kind of plot without any developments that’ll surprise anyone. Even the lead characters seem rather obviously cast for their roles.

However – and this is a rather big “however” in my book – Collet-Serra hits all the expected plot beats with such good timing and trusts in his actors’ abilities to sell the clichés as true so effectively, that I found myself absolutely engrossed in the film, not caring the slightest that I’d seen this all before but in fact enjoying everything as if it were new; or at least new-ish.

It does surely help that Collet-Serra, despite being not much of a name director, is a fine all-rounder (if you ignore Non-Stop, his previous Neeson action movie), in this case demonstrating himself to be fully at home in cracking action sequences, the quick evocation of mood via wet city streets, and making space for old school presence actors like Neeson and Harris to show off their talents without things ever becoming showy.

Run All Night is probably not the sort of film anyone who doesn’t love genre movies as a whole as much as I do will find quite this entrancing but if you’ve a heart for tales of aging violent men and their emotional baggage (surprisingly enough in this case also including some clever mirroring of characters and their respective baggages in the script) you owe it to yourself to watch this. In keeping with most of Collet-Serra’s body of work, it’s a much better film than it strictly needs to be.