The actor stars in the director’s first American film in 20 years, a revenge thriller featuring virtually no dialogue.

When it comes to action movies, dialogue is highly overrated. That’s one of the main takeaways from the new film about a father who goes into full vigilante mode to avenge the death of his young son at the hands of gang violence. Of course, it helps considerably when the film in question is directed by John Woo. Making a striking Hollywood comeback 20 years after the release of his last American film, 2003’s mediocre Paycheck, the veteran action director fully delivers the goods with Silent Night.

We eventually learn the reason for the frenzied chase — namely that he was enjoying a happy moment in his front yard with his wife (Catalina Sandino Moreno) and young son, when the latter was killed by stray gunfire as a result of a shootout between two speeding vehicles passing by. After his ill-fated attempt to catch his son’s killers, Brian wakes up in the hospital and eventually fully recovers but has lost the ability to speak. A sympathetic detective (Scott Mescudi, better known as Kid Cudi) gives him his card, but it’s already clear that justice is unlikely to be served.

Needless to say, all the preparations culminate in a not-so-silent night of intense violence directed against the gang, especially their heavily tattooed leader Playa (Harold Torres, scarily menacing), who not surprisingly takes Brian’s efforts against him rather personally.

Action fans will appreciate Woo’s mastery, which is fully on display here in a series of car chases, shootouts and car chase/shootouts. Despite an obviously low budget, the kinetic sequences are superbly orchestrated and filmed, featuring the occasional doses of slow-motion that are the director’s trademark. (None of his signature white doves make an appearance, but a bird does land on Brian’s hospital room window in meaningful fashion.)

The film’s highlight, however, is not one of many lavishly staged gun battles, but an intensely brutal, lengthy hand-to-hand combat between Brian and one of Playa’s minions that makes the classic fight scene in Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain seem like a schoolyard tussle.

It’s to Woo’s and screenwriter Robert Lynn’s credit, as well the fiercely commanding, intensely physical performance by Kinnaman, that the film’s lack of dialogue proves not a gimmick but an asset. Norma Desmond would surely have approved.