Sometimes the holiday season can just be a little too sweet. It’s why stories like “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” endure, or movies like “Bad Santa” find success — not everyone wants to gulp down saccharine sentiments at Christmastime.
Enter “Violent Night,” in which David Harbour plays a murderous Santa Claus. Borrowing heavily from “Die Hard” and “Home Alone” (both of which are name-checked), and utilizing every Christmassy saying and pun, throw in some extra bloody kills, and voila: a holiday actioner for the gore-hounds. This is a star vehicle, or rather, a sleigh, built specifically for Harbour, who gamely commits to the performance, and is probably the only actor currently working in Hollywood who could pull this off. The result is amusing enough, but it’s as cinematically substantive as a sugar cookie.
Directed by Tommy Wirkola, who has experience shooting wintery wonderland horror (“Dead Snow”) and ironically violent fairy-tale updates (“Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters”), “Violent Night,” written by “Sonic the Hedgehog” writers Patrick Casey and Josh Miller, is cobbled together from the recognizable parts of other Christmas classics. References and riffing are fun, but in “Violent Night,” it feels like we can see the mechanics of the gears cranking, like watching the math done on screen, which saps the bonkers fun that might have been had here.
