Review of the film “Silent Fury” by Hong Kong director John Woo
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John Woo’s Silent Fury is being released – the first film after a six-year break by the Hong Kong director, who from the mid-1980s to the early 2000s was considered the real king of action films, first in his homeland and then in Hollywood. Yulia Shagelman states with regret that he was unable to enter the same river a second time.
The season of Christmas and New Year’s films is starting in cinemas, and Silent Fury, although it is a bloody action film, also acts as a seasonal offering. In the original, the film is called “Silent Night”, that is, “Silent Night”, as the most famous Christmas hymn, and its action fits into one year between two Christmas Eves. One terrible day before the holiest night of winter, the young son (Anthony Juliet) of hard-working electrician Brian Godlock (Joel Kinnaman) becomes the accidental victim of a shootout between two gangs of drug dealers who have started a showdown right in their quiet suburb. The following December 24th, the grieving father, who has spent a year transforming himself into an almost invulnerable killing machine, sets out for revenge. A reindeer sweater, holiday music and a design of huge Christmas balls decorating the den of the main villain (Arold Torres) are included as an entourage.
However, the play on words in both the original and the Russian title of the picture has another meaning. While chasing his son’s killers in the prologue, Brian is shot in the neck, damaging his vocal cords. So the hero cannot talk, and along with him, his wife (Catalina Sandino Moreno), reduced to a sad silent shadow, an honest cop (rapper Kid Cudi), unsuccessfully trying to cleanse the city of rampant bandits and therefore betrays Brian, refuses to communicate with words through his mouth. complete carte blanche for extrajudicial killings, and the bad guys themselves, communicating with each other exclusively through text messages and brutal glances.
The absence of dialogue (although some words are still sometimes heard in the background) is the main formal feature of the film, which is otherwise a completely standard story about a people’s avenger whose name is legion.
Once upon a time, in the eighties and nineties, the choreographed, incredibly beautiful shootouts in John Woo’s films were compared to ballet. In “Silent Fury”, he, apparently remembering the time of his creative heyday, decided to bring this technique to its apogee, not to say absurd, but, alas, there is no talk of any ballet beauty anymore, and the result is, to put it mildly, discouraging.
It’s not that this film really needs dialogue, which, let’s be honest, was never John Woo’s strong suit (who remembers what the characters in The Hitman or Hard Boiled talk about, and the text in Face/Off? on the contrary, I would like to erase it from my memory). But in the absence of lines, Joel Kinnaman for some reason begins to wildly overact, although his hero, even in a normal script, would be a silent and withdrawn man, unable to openly express his feelings – it is not at all necessary to bulge his eyes and tense his jaw expressively to emphasize this.
Woo himself fills the screen with so many of the most hackneyed visual cliches that bad suspicions creep into your head: were all those flying white doves and rapid-fire bullet trajectories in his films always the same vulgarity? Or are these techniques perceived as such from 2023, after numerous imitators have replicated them for forty years? All the action scenes in “Silent Fury” look like a copy of a copy and a copy, and although there is not a single dove here, they are replaced by a completely shameless cliche: a red ball released into the clear blue sky by an innocently murdered child. As you follow him with your eyes, you share Brian’s desire to return to the moment when his son was alive, nothing bad had happened yet, and one could think about John Woo’s filmography with pleasant nostalgia, and not with a feeling of acute awkwardness.
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