Santa's Jolliest Beatdowns In Violent Night, Ranked
This below post contains spoilers for "Violent Night."
We're all tired of hearing the age-old holiday season debate of, "Is "Die Hard" a Christmas movie?" While we won't go down that rabbit hole, there's a new contender for the best holiday action movie that is undoubtedly a Christmas movie. What happens when you take the plot of "Die Hard," add a dash of "Home Alone," and a healthy heaping of "John Wick"? A new b***** holiday classic is born! David Harbour will surely jingle your funny bells as a disgruntled Santa Claus in the action-packed, brutally violent, hilarious, and surprisingly heartfelt "Violent Night."
"Violent Night" opens on Christmas Eve with a drunk Santa (Harbour) bemoaning how kids these days are greedier than ever. He takes off into the night sky, vomiting on the poor bartender from above. Santa ends up at the estate of the Lightstone family, megamillionaires who built their fortune from nefarious government contracts. While Santa enjoys homemade cookies by the youngest Lightstone, Trudy (Leah Brady), some holiday code-named bad guys take the family hostage, hoping to rob them of all their blood money. Santa is reluctantly dragged into the fray, eventually leading good ol' St. Nick to unleash a dormant warrior inside of him and unwrap some season's beatings. So grab your egg nog and cozy up by the fire as we rank Santa's jolliest beatdowns from "Violent Night."
6. Honorable mentions - Mansion takeover and a manger melee
These two action sequences have more goodies than a treat-filled stocking. However, they don't reach the gleeful heights of the rest of the film. Gertrude Lightstone's (the delightfully evil matriarch played by Beverly D'Angelo) annual Christmas party has begun, and her children and their families are all sucking up to her as she pretends not to be an awful person. But this dysfunctional family soiree comes to a screeching halt when half the party's staff turns out to be undercover bad guys led by a man named Scrooge (John Leguizamo) looking to steal a sleigh-full of dough from the Lightstone vault. Candy Cane (Mitra Suri) hacks up a hallway of guards in seconds while Gingerbread (Andre Eriksen) and his team mow down the rest. The take-over scene is quick, dirty, and feels like a scene cut from "Die Hard 2."
Towards the film's end, Jason Lightstone (Alex Hassell) and his wife, Linda (Alexis Louder), make amends while throwing down in a manger display. One of the henchmen, momentarily knocked unconscious by a well-packed snowball, comes to and takes on the married duo. Baby Jesus becomes a bludgeoning tool. The Wisemen's bodies are tossed about, ending with an icy finisher from Linda. (She jabs an icicle into the assailant's throat!) Hooray, mom and dad fell in love again over some random bad guy's dead body. Christmas miracles do happen.
5. Santa vs. Tinsel
Santa's been on the nice list for too long, so he's a bit rusty in his first fist-to-cuffs. He's blissfully enjoying a much-needed break in a fancy massage chair when shots ring out. Goodbye, relaxing mini-retreat! He conspicuously hides behind the Lightstone's Christmas tree. When the goon named Tinsel discovers him, he pleads that he has a job to do and doesn't want any trouble. After two hits from the butt of Tinsel's rifle, Santa catches the third one and fights back.
Santa as an action hero is already a fantastic setup. But to make him a vulnerable and flawed hero is icing on the sugar cookie. Most importantly, this first fight establishes the film's stakes. Santa's strength isn't otherworldly, nor does he turn into John Wick once he finds a gun. Santa needs time to get his sledgehammer-swinging groove back, which adds a level of fun and danger to the events. You may be worried that Santa goes quietly into the night with this first match. Sure, he takes a beating — even a gingerbread house to the face — but, he eventually gets the upper hand and knocks Tinsel out of the window. Forgetting that the lights wrapped them both up, Santa crashes to the ground. He stands up to see Tinsel meet the sharp end of a very stabby ice sculpture, embodying the perfect tone for subsequent action scenes.
4. Home Alone homage
Santa doesn't arrive in this scene until its ending. But before anyone yells, "bah humbug," we promise it deserves to make any action hero's nice list. Throughout the film, Trudy communicates via walkie-talkie to Santa. She's the voice of encouragement to Kris Kringle, the Reginald VelJohnson to his John McClane. But Trudy's shining moment is when she takes on Gingerbread and Candy Cane in a hilariously violent homage to "Home Alone."
Trudy dishes out her version of Kevin McCallister's sadistic traps, which plays way more brutally funny than the family-friendly classic. Gingerbread and Candy Cane track Trudy to the attic, where they see she's left a board littered with nails and a single nail sticking out of the ladder. Gingerbread scoffs, thinking he's dealing with a dumb kid who's seen too many movies. He takes one step and discovers that the ladder rung has been sawed in half, sending him crashing down on the pointy nail. Candy Cane crawls over him and faces a bevy of bowling balls launched from a trampoline. She takes a few good hits, but the strike comes when a ball knocks Gingerbread off the ladder, jamming a nail into his forehead. Candy Cane gets stuck in a pool of glue, falling backward and ripping the back of her hair off, and steps on glass ornament shards. Eventually, Santa arrives to finish the job. The film winks at "Home Alone" with care and violent glee.
3. Santa vs. Frosty
Santa's second fight pits him against Frosty (Can Aydin). Here we start seeing Santa's naughty side. Frosty corners Santa in the game room, tossing him over the pool table, thinking this rosy-cheeked gentleman won't put up much of a fight. Santa reaches into his present-filled sack to find a weapon, grumbling until he finds a porcelain doll. He shatters the toy on Frosty's head. Santa's sack transforms into a defensive tool, with Santa and Frosty using it to block blows or restock weapons. Santa pulls out a giant candy cane. Frosty's knife — meant for Santa — stabs a wrapped gift instead. Then, the violence goes full-on ho-ho-holy s*** when Santa stuffs a special stocking filled with billiard balls.
What follows is why this fight ranks so high. Santa cracks Frosty on the hand and across the face until the sock rips open, sending the balls flying like a flock of turtle doves. The rest of the fight is a scrappy, grab-anything-you-can-find melee. Santa tosses a dart board at Frosty. He then kicks and punches darts deeper into this fleshy snowman. Tinsel from the tree becomes a strangulation tool, and when Frosty seems to have Santa dead to rights, he catches a Christmas star to the eyeball. But it doesn't finish him off. He keeps coming at Mr. Claus, who frantically reaches for the plug and gives Frosty a shocking end, electrocuting his skull until it bursts into flames like a festive yule log.
2. Santa vs. the Kill Squad
Santa's already survived two one-on-one brawls, but the fight with the Kill Squad is next level. Gertrude gloats to Scrooge that once her private security Kill Squad shows up, he and his crew are as good as dead. Gertrude and the audience don't realize that the Kill Squad is working for Scrooge. They show up armed to the teeth, ready to root out the red thorn in Scrooge's side. At first, Santa seems outmanned and outgunned. The Kill Squad unleashes a hail of bullets in his direction as he hides on the rooftop. But with the encouragement of Trudy to remember his warrior past and a bit of Christmas magic, he finds his weapon of choice: It's hammer time!
As the Kill Squad circles the building, Santa stealthily picks them off. One gets a swift sledgehammer to the face, another dies via tinsel, and the last becomes impaled by an extra sharp sled. When the rest of the team enters, Santa sledgehammers skulls, kneecaps, and limbs. He uses the sharpest candy cane to go stab-happy and even decapitates one of the Kill Squad with an ice skate. But the battle doesn't end there! Santa tosses rope around two more and the other end into a wood chipper. (Let's just say things get very "Fargo" from there.) The final squad member meets an explosive ending, with a grenade down his britches. Hands down, it's one of the merriest, bloodiest fight scenes in film this year.
1. Santa vs. Scrooge
Heat up some cocoa for the main event!: The final showdown between Santa is what this list has been building to explore. With Santa's skull-crushing sledgehammer and Scrooge dawning a baton and ice axe, they face off amongst the fiery wreckage of a cabin. (Fittingly, only the chimney remains intact.) Santa takes several stabs and hits, exhausted and wounded from the events of this unholy night. Scrooge hacks away at Santa, and it seems it could end up being a silent night for our hero. However, it turns out Santa has a bit of Christmas magic left...up his nose.
This scene introduces what film historians might one day call "Chekhov's chimney." Once we see that smoke stack still standing, we're giddy as a kid on Christmas morning to unwrap the film's final bloody present. Scrooge readies to deliver the death blow to Santa. With a twitch of his nose, he bearhugs Scrooge and throws him in the chimney, making his body explode like a "Mortal Kombat" fatality. Blood sprays in a red torrential downpour. Santa tosses what's left of Scrooge's mangled upper torso to the ground. After this hilariously grotesque display, the movie wraps up all the blood-drenched action with a charming bow — sprinkling in that warm fuzzy feeling classic Christmas movies have. To Harbour's credit, Santa slays in this epic, instant holiday classic.