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.
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