Feel free to disagree all you want, but in this writer’s estimation, John Woo‘s Hard Boiled is without a doubt the single greatest action movie that’s ever been made, more than living up to its tagline of being “more exciting than a dozen Die Hards.”
Even if you harbor an entirely different opinion, then it can’t be denied that the filmmaker is perhaps responsible for more stone-cold genre classics than anybody else. In addition to the aforementioned orgy of bullets, blood, and octane, his filmography includes A Better Tomorrow, The Killer, Face/Off, and the sprawling historical epic Red Cliff to name but four, even if he’s hardly immune from the odd misfire, either.
After 20 years of self-imposed Hollywood exile, though, Woo is heading back to screens in December with Silent Night, an entirely dialogue-free experiment that stars Joel Kinnaman as a vengeful father seeking to exact justice on the people who killed his son, replete with a Christmas Eve setting.
Suffice to say, an entire feature forced to survive entirely on Woo’s signature style at the expense of dialogue is enough to get the pulse racing, and the recent debut of the first full-length trailer has ratcheted up the hype substantially.
Woo’s previous Stateside sojourn didn’t exactly end on a high following the back-to-back busts of Windtalkers and Paycheck, but Silent Night looks a lot more up his alley than either of those films. Will it be as good as his best? Maybe, maybe not, but it looks like another shot in the arm for action cinema regardless.
