Violent Night has nothing on Home Alone and Bad Santa
Violent Night is part Die Hard Santa, part rich-but-stupid people satire, part schmaltzy Christmas-still-matters homily.
Violent Night (MA15+)
In cinemas
★★
Ever had a Christmas gathering that, despite everyone’s good intentions, turned into a day you lived to regret? If so, watching the Christmas action-comedy Violent Night will remind you that art can imitate life.
The only differences are that this is 112 minutes of your life rather than a day, which is a small gift, and not everyone lives. It stars the fine American actor David Harbour as a jaded Santa Claus, a role that wastes his talent.
This movie is directed by Norwegian filmmaker Tommy Wirkola, who studied film at Bond University on the Gold Coast.
He returned home and has had success in Hollywood re-imagining classic stories, starting with his first English language feature, Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters (2013).
His new take on an old story, however, is a Christmas stocking stacked with presents no one wants.
It’s part Die Hard Santa, part rich-but-stupid people satire, part schmaltzy Christmas-still-matters homily. Put together it’s like giving a kid a yo-yo without the string.
The rich family, the Lightstones, are headed by matriarch Gertrude (Beverly D’Angelo), who lives in a gated compound in Connecticut.
On Christmas Eve, she is joined by her daughter Linda (Alexis Louder), son Jason (Alex Hassell), their other halves and children. This is one messed-up family and there are mildly amusing moments in their back-and-forth at each other.
The bickering clan is soon joined by a group of mercenaries led by a man who calls himself Mr Scrooge (John Leguizamo, also in a role below his talents). They are after the hundreds of millions stored in the family vault.
Also in the mansion, as it happens, is Santa Claus (Harbour), drinking the good liquor. He’s a cynical Santa, no Saint Nick, but decides, because he likes the youngest family member Trudy (Leah Brady), to save the day.
“Santa Claus is coming to town,” he says in one of the cut-price Christmas cliches that litter the script (Pat Casey and Josh Miller). “Bah humbug motherf--ker,’’ is Mr Scrooge’s offering.
The reindeer, in their too-brief cameo, have crapped on the roof and taken off, so Santa has to go solo.
There’s a tedious Viking days backstory that explains why he’s able to wipe out dozens of soldiers armed only with a sledgehammer. That’s followed by a long sequence of him sledgehammering heads.
Seven-year-old Trudy becomes his comrade-in-arms by copying a Christmas film she has just seen, Home Alone. The difference is that the 1990 movie is funny.
Santas who are naughty rather than nice have been done before, most notably by Billy Bob Thornton in Bad Santa (2003). But despite the blood and vomit in his beard, this Santa isn’t naughty – he only sledgehammers the bad guys – and he’s far more boring for it.
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Meet Cute (M)
Amazon Prime
★★★½
The American romantic comedy Meet Cute takes its title from a Hollywood screenwriting staple. Two people meet in unusual, unexpected or accidental circumstances, often with comic results, and the seeds of romance are sown.
There’s a classic meet cute in the 1999 British comedy Notting Hill when Hugh Grant bumps into Julia Roberts and spills his orange juice all over her. I like one from around the same time, in Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight, where George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez meet in the boot of a car.
In Meet Cute, directed by Alex Lehmann and written by Noga Pnueli, it’s not the place of the meeting that matters but how it comes about.
Sheila (Kaley Cuoco, so good in the TV series The Flight Attendant) walks into a New York bar and spots Gary (Pete Davidson, star of the 2020 film The King of Staten Island).
She buys him a drink and as they chat she seems to know what he’s going to say before he says it. This is not a lucky guess. She tells him — there’s no mucking around in the script — that she’s a time traveller and they have met before.
Indeed they have shared — and will continue to share — this one night over and over again. Unsurprisingly he does not believe her. When she asks if he thinks she’s crazy, he nods but adds, “But it’s really cute”.
This one night is her idea of a perfect date. She tells Gary she has been waiting her whole life for him. Gary, however, starts thinking less cute, more crazy.
The two leads are terrific. The awkward chemistry between them leads to the inevitable question Sheila and Gary will face: love ’em or leave ’em? The opening song is Gerry Goffin-Carole King’s Will You Love Me Tomorrow.
It’s a clever twist on Groundhog Day and the two films share some similarities. Sheila thinks Gary is her one true love but even she tires of his Sophie’s Choice joke, made night after night, as they choose which restaurant to dine in.
“Even a perfectly cooked steak starts to taste like shit when you eat it day after day,’’ she tells him. He, of course, thinks he has made that joke just once, on this one, only and probably last date.
The perfect date, it seems, could be more perfect. This adds some serious questions to this humorous 89-minute film.
The time machine, located in a nail salon, can take Sheila back more than 24 hours.
What are the limits when it comes to changing someone’s life? If you remove their painful past, do you also remove part of who they are now?
This is an entertaining movie with fine performances by the two stars. The post-credits out takes, which show how the date pans out on different nights, is worth waiting for, especially for the ice cream van and its increasingly odd confectionary combinations.
Avarice (M)
In cinemas from December 8
★★★
“Do we really need to bring the bow?” That’s what investment banker Ash (Luke Ford) asks his wife Kate (Gillian Alexy) as they pack the car for a weekend away.
Their marriage is rocky and they hope the time together will steady the ship. Their teen daughter Sarah (Tea Heathcote-Marks) hopes so too.
Kate insists the bow must be packed, and just as well she does. She’s not a violinist but an archer, one good enough to compete for world titles.
No sooner are the family in the luxurious rural retreat somewhere in Western Australia than they have unexpected guests. Two guns-for-hire, Reed (Alexandra Nell) and Kane (Ryan Panizza), break in and take Kate and Sarah hostage.
They look like professionals: clad in black from head to toe, ear buds in their ears, silencers on their automatic pistols. Ash is told he has three hours to transfer $10m into three bank accounts.
If he fails to do so, everyone is dead.
This is the set up for the Australian thriller Avarice, directed and co-written by John V. Soto, who has made his name in this genre (The Reckoning in 2014, starring Luke Hemsworth and Gateway in 2018, starring Jacqueline McKenzie ).
This 88-minute movie is a well-acted kill-or-be-killed survival drama with some decent twists. It’s grimly funny at times. Retinal scans may be state-of-the-art security safeguards, but there are state-of-war ways of overcoming them.
Alexy has made her name in American TV series, including The Americans. Ford won an AFI award for The Black Balloon (2008), alongside Toni Collette. Nell is good as the intense lead mercenary, who, almost unavoidably, is ex-military, ex-service-in-Syria.
I don’t think we need a spoiler alert to say that Kate manages to escape, unpack her bow and return. “Are you f..king serious?” the arrogant Kane says on seeing her with arrow drawn. The answer is yes.
As I watched I thought of another film about a corporate weekend away that goes bad: John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972), where Burt Reynolds flexes the bow and arrow.
It’s a great film. Avarice is not at that level but it’s a fast-paced thriller that has enough surprises to keep viewers on the edge of their seats.
Five shows to watch this week
A silly, sexy, salacious romp called Rivals is based on Jilly Cooper’s famous book, plus South Korea’s dying breed of haenyeo – women divers.
What you didn’t know about the Roman empire
This remarkable exhibition deals with an aspect of Roman culture that is relatively unfamiliar to most people.