Santa has lost his motivation. He is stopping at bars while delivering presents, and he has become very jaded to the giving, because everyone just wants cash as their present, or they want something simple and mindless, like a video game. Santa blames capitalism as the kill joy. While that is happening, the Lightstones, a very wealthy family, are starting to gather for their Christmas celebration. Jason and Linda are having some marital troubles due to the money, and Jason always trying to make his mother proud, so he can inherit the family business, but this year, he has a new plan, but he has not told anyone yet. His sister, Alva, is still all in on the family money, and she is using her family as pawns in the game. But one cannot become filthy rich without making some enemies. A heist is afoot, and the man behind the heist, knows everything about the Lightstones and their defensive protocols. He quickly eliminates their guards, and he bought out their back up defense, so they are completely vulnerable, except its Christmas and Santa is paying them a visit.
At this point, Santa has had too much to drink, and he was asleep when the fighting started, but he was quickly awoken by the automatic machine guns firing. Initially he was only worried about his own safety, but the reindeer flew away scared, leaving Santa stranded, so he starts to fight for his life. Apparently, Santa was originally a Viking, so he has some serious skills, and when he finds out Trudy, Jason’s daughter, is in danger, he decides to help save the whole family.
Once Santa and Trudy start to work together, using walkie-talkies, the movie divulges into a more violent and vulgar Home Alone. Trudy escapes from the living room where all the Lightstones were being held hostage, and she makes her way to the attic, where hijinks ensue. She sets some traps on the ladder leading to the attic, and once in the attic, there were other surprises waiting for the thieves. She also helped get Santa out of a tough situation by making it seem like it was snowing, but really, she was just putting Styrofoam through the cracks of the ceiling. The best scene of the film comes from Santa in the shed taking out a whole squad of armored troops. He also uses some ingenuity and his favorite weapon, a hammer to do so. It was truly an impressive action set piece for any movie, let alone a Christmas movie with Santa being the perpetrator of the violence.
This was an interesting take on Santa. He said that he had been with Mrs. Claus for 1,100 years, so clearly, he had been doing the whole delivering presents thing for a long time. There were multiple occasions when he admitted to not having any idea about how the Christmas magic worked. This leads me to believe that maybe someone was in charge before, and then he took over, because it just does not make sense that a magic bag and sleigh would appear out of nowhere and with no specific person creating it.
There was a lot of time wasted focusing on the family disfunction, and some boring plot lines between the thieves and the family, when they could have used that time for the Santa origin story. They showed that he was a Viking warrior, and that he had a specific war hammer that he loved called skull crusher, and this made for a good call back joke at the end of the movie, that no one else in the audience seemed to enjoy but me, but largely the back story was ignored. They could have mentioned how he became Santa. Did he get lost on an expedition and accidently end up in the North Pole and find something magical? Did a special white reindeer find him after a day of battle and guide him to the North Pole? Did he donate all the toys he pillaged from the villages that he destroyed with the Vikings, and then did someone gift him a magic bag and reindeer. I want to know! There must be a reason why he does not know how the magic works, and it would have been a much better use of the time to explain this.
My biggest issue with the whole film was the run time. It was an hour and fifty-two minutes, which for a Christmas movie is long, and for an action movie, its normal, but the issue was that this was sold more as an action movie, and it has a lot of Christmas family slop. They actually hit most of the major themes for Christmas movies, they touch on the importance of family, that it is not all about money, that working together can help save the day, and that violence should be fought with violence. At times the movie was very cliché, and the lines could be predicted based on their set up. The real action did not start until there was about thirty or forty minutes left. There was the initial action of the thieves taking over, but that was not too impressive from a visual standpoint, so there was a long wait for the advertised explosive action, I just wish that it came sooner.
One review I saw said that it was like taking Die Hard and Home Alone and merging the two. So the following day, I watched Home Alone for the first time in forever. I knew it was a Christmas favorite, but I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it. It was a lot of fun, and even in the down moments, it was still working towards its ultimate goal. The one thing that shocked me was how rude everyone was to Kevin. To be fair, he was very snarky, but he did not deserve the hate that he was getting. He also proved to be totally competent in surviving by himself. This is a family movie, but if they took the hijinks and fun out of it, and if they made it a more serious movie, it would be terrifying. I can think of nothing that I was more scared of when I was little than being home alone and having someone try to break in, so shout out to him for being brave. Not only was he able to defend himself, but he was also very profound. The scene of him in the church with the shovel slasher was very touching, and the way he was able to analogize his fear of the furnace to other guy’s fear of talking to his son was impressive.
Both movies are fun, and I definitely recommend watching Home Alone on Disney+, but I am guessing most people have seen it before. I gave it four stars. Violent Night on the other hand has its moments, but it also has a large amount of fluff. As far as Christmas movies go, it is just as watchable as most of the others are, and it gives you something different with the large amount of violence and explicit language. It can be funny and clever as well. I gave it two and a half stars. It is in theaters now, something fun to do with it starting to get cold outside.
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