Violent Night
Director: Timmy Wirkola
Release year: 2022
Santa Claus is drunk in a bar, despairing of children’s greed, and thinking about giving it all up. While delivering presents to a rural mansion, he interrupts a robbery, and to save good girl Trudy he has to call on his skills as a Viking warrior.
You can imagine the pitch—Die Hard meets Home Alone with Santa—and it plays out exactly like that. There are some outstanding fight scenes between Santa and the mercenary military home invaders, but the first half is a struggle because it’s not as amusing as it thinks it is, the characters are annoying, and you just want to see Father Christmas fight people. Once he gets his sledgehammer, it becomes far more fun.
It’s exceptionally violent. There’s a sequence where the girl, Trudy, hides in the attic and sets a series of Home Alone traps, and the ensuing mutilations are grim and hilarious. There’s a heart of gold beneath the broken jaws, cracked limbs and decorations in eyeballs, I just wish it was twenty minutes shorter.