‘Violent Night’ review: David Harbour a delightful mix of naughty and nice

Movie review

Santa belches.

He curses. He steps in reindeer poop. He pukes on a lady’s head. 

And he’s just getting started in “Violent Night.”

Bad Santa. Bad, bad Santa. 

Eh. They already made that movie. And a sequel. But David Harbour’s Santa puts Billy Bob Thornton to shame in “Violent Night.”

Because … see that title? He’s not kidding around. Death by icicle comes courtesy of the Claus. And who knew the deadly potential hidden in a seemingly harmless electric treetop star ornament. Keep an eye out for that one. Literally. 

Then there’s the matter of the hammer. Santa confides he had a life long before he got into the ho-ho-ho line of work. Kind of a Viking iteration of a persona. He was a warrior and thief armed with a trusty hammer dubbed Skull Crusher. All these years later he hasn’t lost his touch with that thing.

And whose skulls merit his less-than-tender ministrations with his medieval skill set? Why, a heavily armed band of hostage-taking terrorists who come calling at Christmas. Is Hans Gruber in the house? Nah. John Leguizamo is the leader of the pack, shouting obscenities and punching a grandma right in the kisser. Courtly Hans would be appalled.

That R rating is deserved. No surprise there, considering the director is Tommy Wirkola, the Norwegian filmmaker who gifted the world with the “Dead Snow” series. You know, the one with the Nazi zombies. Graphic blood and guts are kind of his calling card. 

But wait. Before you dismiss “Violent Night” as a gross gore-fest know this: It actually is kind of sweet. Really.

That’s thanks to its screenplay credited to Pat Casey and Josh Miller, the writing team behind the “Sonic the Hedgehog” movies. The sweetness is found in the relationship between Harbour’s Santa and a 7-year-old girl named Trudy played by Leah Brady. She believes in the big guy with all her heart, and her dearest wish is for Santa to help patch up the fractured relationship between her estranged parents, played by Alex Hassell and Alexis Louder. They’re all hostages of Leguizamo’s gang, trapped together in the family mansion in an upscale gated community. The hostage-takers are after a hidden cache of family loot.

Communicating via a set of walkie-talkies, Santa offers reassurances that he will do everything he can to try to rescue Trudy while gently letting her know that fixing adult relationships is a tougher challenge.

Trudy is a resourceful child who manages to elude the bad guys, hides in the attic and then devises a set of booby traps to thwart the killers. She knows how to do this because she’s a big fan of the “Home Alone” movies. She is, however, much cuter than Macaulay Culkin. 

Harbour is a revelation in the lead role. His Santa is a thoughtful guy, made wearily cynical by the commercialization of Christmas, tenderhearted in his treatment of kids on his Nice list and devoted to Mrs. Claus after all their centuries together.

The balance between the brutal elements and the sweet stuff is a tricky one, and Harbour and the filmmakers navigate it adroitly. It sometimes borders on cloying but never crosses the line. The violence, however, is really severe in sections but is handled with clever humor that takes the edge off the rough parts.

Curiously, the weakest elements are the performances of the two most prominent names in the cast: Leguizamo and Beverly D’Angelo, who plays the matriarch of the extended family taken hostage. Both deliver their obscenity-laden lines with unsparing stridency.  

Despite that, though, the picture is a hugely entertaining crowd-pleaser studded with laugh-out-loud moments from beginning to end. Ho-hos aplenty in this one.