Silent Night is a Death Wish-style vigilante revenge riff that manages to deliver the absolute bare minimum of what the subgenre requires in the most half-hearted manner possible. Fans expecting a grand return of legendary Hong Kong director John Woo into the Hollywood market — as this is his first such film since 2003’s Paycheck — will be disappointed, but at his age and status he’s earned a few middling clunkers. Not every director can get away with putting graffiti of his own visage on the wall during a shootout.

The story follows Brian Godluck (Joel Kinnaman), a blue-collar working-class father who loses his son in a drive-by shooting. Godluck pursues the murderers across town, where he ends up shot in the neck by Playa (Harold Torres), one of the gang leaders. The wound destroys our hero’s vocal cords, rendering him mute. Brian’s situation serves as the in-universe rationale for the rest of the movie containing almost no dialogue whatsoever, even among characters who maintain use of their voices. He spends the next year preparing revenge on the gang, keeping a calendar in his garage with Christmas Eve marked with such incriminating statements as “Kill Them All” and “Start Gang War?”

For the first act of the movie, though, Woo struggles with the “silent” contrivance, which never really works. The story and characters are constantly finding little cheats to deliver necessary exposition — text messages, letters, videos. Each time makes it clearer that nobody involved behind the scenes ever figured out why the movie needed to be silent beyond the marketing gimmick. I’ve seen the first acts described as boring; I didn’t think that was the case, although it wasn’t because I was attached to Godluck’s traumatic journey from grieving father to Punisher-lite. I was mostly entertained watching the crew figure out how to tell its story with an artificial restriction — and mostly failing.

Woo’s visual style and earnest approach to heightened melodrama are his calling cards, particularly when it comes to his Hollywood films, and it’s interesting to see him struggle. He just doesn’t have the right visual language or scene structure to make the film feel propulsive while also trusting actors to convey everything without speech. It’s not a complex story — it’s gangland revenge pulp — but until the bullets start flying, you start to wonder when Woo will show up. Once Godluck starts his revenge spree, things pick up a bit. It’s grisly, extreme violence, but competently shot with some added flourish.

The title Silent Night implies a succulent concept — a silent action film set during the Christmas season. But the setting is barely used beyond one very cool set design at the end of the film. It might be corny, but I wish Godluck wrapped bombs in presents or sharpened an old tree into pongees to trap the bad guys. Anything to really embrace the premise. Maybe even a few seasonal needle-drops.

I can see why people expect more from Woo; that’s fair. This is easily the least of his American films and probably his most mundane film in general. If you can stomach the first act as an interesting and flawed creative experiment and enjoy revenge stories with bloody denouements, though, there’s still something to enjoy here by the time the credits roll. Just don’t expect much from it.