“Violent Night”, which is currently available on Netflix in South Korea, wants to be a viciously and violently funny Christmas flick, and I do not mind that, but, boy, what an insipid piece of work it is. While its one-joke comic premise may be amusing to you for a while, this utterly joyless movie soon becomes quite stale and tedious amidst lots of merely mean violent moments, and my mind kept thinking of a number of better alternatives to be watched around the end of this year.

The story promise is very simple: Santa Claus as a killing machine against some bad guys out there. The bad guys in the film are a bunch of mean criminals who invade a big mansion in the middle of some isolated snowy area on Christmas Eve, and they soon hold its very rich owner and her family as hostages as a part of their vicious criminal plan. When Santa, played by David Harbour, later drops by the mansion for giving the present for a little sweet girl who is one of the hostages, he surely gets involved into the situation more than he wants, and he comes to demonstrate his old particular set of skills.

It would be more shocking and amusing if Santa were a seemingly mild and gentle figure, but the movie does not hide its bitter viciousness at all right from the opening scene showing Santa being as depressed and drunk as Billy Bob Thornton’s anti-hero character in “Bad Santa” (2003). He morosely complains a lot about how people have been quite disappointing to him these days, and that makes me wonder how he managed to keep working during last several centuries of the human history, which surely had a lot of much worse things to depress him.

Around the time when Santa flies to the aforementioned mansion despite quite drunk, we are introduced to a number of other characters who happen to have a Christmas family meeting there, and many of them are quite despicable to say the least. The owner of the mansion is a domineering matriarch who does not hesitate to use dirty words in front of her little granddaughter, but her family members do not say much mainly because of her immense wealth, and only her granddaughter is willing to enjoy Christmas sincerely in contrast to many others around her.

When this little girl is about to go to bed as expecting a nice present to receive in the next morning, those bad guys swiftly hold the mansion under control, and then there comes their boss. This dude, played by John Leguizamo, turns out to have been quite spiteful about Christmas, and, for his little twisted amusement, he even gives his underlings silly alias associated with Christmas (One of them is called “Gingerbread”, for example).

As watching the bad guys trying to break into the underground safe while holding several hostages, my mind was instantly reminded of, yes, “Die Hard” (1988). After he comes across one of the bad guys and then happens to kill that bad guy during the following fight, Santa becomes a reluctant hero to save the day just like Bruce Willis’ character in that classic action thriller film, and you may have a déjà vu when he has a private conversation scene with that little girl via walkie talkies in the middle of the story.

In case of that little girl, played by young Leah Brady, she cannot help but excited a bit as she gets a chance to do something not so far from, surprise, “Home Alone” (1990), and what she does next should not be imitated by many young kids out there. Although her little booby traps are not as elaborate as the ones devised by that little boy in “Home Alone”, they result in some violent and bloody moments which will definitely remind you that the movie is not exactly ideal for your Christmas family meeting.

All these and many other mean and violent moments could be acceptable if they were accompanied with enough wit, style, and substance, but the movie unfortunately does not have any of them. While many of its supposedly comic moments are flat and bland without much laugh for us, those violent action scenes in the film are curiously tepid despite occasionally making you cringe or wince for good reasons, and, above all, it is quite deficient in terms of story and character. As the story slouches toward its expecting ending without much narrative momentum, we become more distant to its characters who are no more than cardboard characters to be killed or threatened, and it is really disheartening to see its cast members struggling to sell their boring and uninteresting characters as much as possible.

In case of Harbour, he has some fun with his character’s gruff personality while being a sort of saving grace of the film, but it is still a shame that he is not allowed to do anything as funny and vicious as whatever Thornton did in “Bad Santa”. While the other main cast members including Leguizamo and Brady are thoroughly wasted, Beverly D’Angelo manages to leave some impression even though she often seems bored about whatever is going on around her.

“Violent Night” is directed by Tommy Wirkola, a Norwegian filmmaker who previous made “Dead Snow” (2009) and its 2014 sequel film. Both of these snowy and gory horror comedy films are a little too flawed in my inconsequential opinion, but they are relatively more enjoyable compared to the disappointing incompetence of “Violent Night”, and maybe you should watch them or several aforementioned films instead during the upcoming winter season.