93 min | R | December 9, 2022 | Lionsgate
Armed robbers in Santa suits tear through a city at Christmas, and a detective named Knight is supposed to stop them. Bruce Willis gets top billing and almost no screen time. The mask is the only thing here with a personality.
Detective James Knight returns from his predecessor, but he is barely in this movie. The story belongs to a gang of armed robbers dressed as Santa Claus who tear through a city during the holidays. Their leader, Ricky Conlan, styles himself the Christmas Bomber and treats his spree as a personal crusade. Knight tracks the case from the margins while younger cops do most of the legwork. The film is a holiday action programmer built around a star who occupies a fraction of it.
Bruce Willis plays Knight with the flat affect that defines his late work. He delivers his lines from behind a desk or through a phone, and the editing cuts around him to hide how little he is present. Paul Johansson plays Conlan with theatrical menace that the script never earns. He chews through his Santa-suit monologues as if the part deserves more weight than it carries. Lochlyn Munro and Beau Mirchoff handle the bulk of the procedural scenes as Fitzgerald and Casey Rhodes, and they carry the connective tissue the lead cannot.
Edward John Drake directs from his own screenplay, working from a story he wrote with Corey Large, who also appears as Mercer. Drake shoots the action in dim interiors and rain-slicked streets that flatten every set into the same gray template. The coverage betrays the production. Willis is framed in tight singles and reverse shots that rarely place him in the same physical space as the other actors. The Santa-mask robberies promise a hook the staging never delivers, and the gunfights resolve in quick cuts that obscure geography rather than build it.
The film exists to package a star who is no longer a star into a product that looks like one. Knight is a name on a poster, not a character with anything to discover. Conlan’s vendetta supplies a plot but no stakes, because the movie has no interest in either man beyond their function. Drake assembles the pieces of an action film and forgets to give any of them a reason to matter. What remains is a holiday thriller that mistakes a costume for an idea.