Viggo Mortenson and David Cronenberg re-teamed for this well-made yet rather stale thriller that is a step down from their masterpiece A History of Violence but still an interesting film with one truly memorable sequence. The movie works better than it should due to the outstanding performance by Mortenson, who plays an even more buffed out and scarier version of the former life Mortenson character from A History of Violence. He’s joined here by Naomi Watts, adequate as a woman named Anna who becomes obsessed with the case of a lost Russian girl who was raped and impregnated, leaving a baby right before she dies a grisly death. In searching for the baby’s home, she finds herself in the midst of a dangerous situation involving a Russian crime family who don’t exactly want the truth behind this incident released. Mortenson plays the driver Nikolai for this group of people, a man who has conflicting principles and a plethora of enemies. Also starring in the film are Vincent Cassell and Armin Mueller-Stahl, playing Kirill and Sernyon, in a most twisted display of father-son relationships. They practically deserve each other.

David Cronenberg is a richly talented filmmaker who has made films that I don’t like but never a film that I found boring. Even in his more distant of films, he creates characters and situations that you care about. I found A History of Violence to be the best film of 2005, a taut, fascinating narrative with fantastic performances from Mortenson, Maria Bello, Ed Harris, and the Oscar-nominated William Hurt. It’s the best film of Cronenberg’s I’ve seen since The Fly, which will forever remain his most accomplished piece of work. There are still a lot of films of his I need to see, including The Dead Zone and 1996’s Crash, for instance, but I’ve seen enough to understand that many of his films require a great deal of attention and restraint. The film he made before A History of Violence, the Ralph Fiennes starrer Spider, is a truly difficult watch, confused and melodramatic. It’s beautifully shot and Eastern Promises falls somewhere closer to Spider than it does to A History of Violence. There are beautiful performances (with Mortenson especially convincing) and exquisite moments (a scarily realstic scene in a cemetery, a brief kiss between Anna and Nikolai) that work, but as a whole the movie never really amounts to enough to make the journey truly worthwhile. There’s not enough punch, so to speak.

Eastern Promises opens with a mysterious throat slashing and then is immediately followed by a young Russian girl falling to her death in a market, where blood stains the hard hallow ground. These initial two scenes are enticing, but the movie slowly starts to turn into a slow-moving drama that’s overly talky and poorly paced. I admired a lot about this film, but I didn’t find myself truly fascinated by very much. It’s almost a sigh of relief by the time we get to the already infamous bath house fight scene, in which a completely nude Mortenson takes on two opponents with knives. It’s a brilliantly constructed, jaw-dropping scene that almost seems to belong in a different movie. In some ways, it feels like Cronenberg throws it in there to satisfy his more gore-hungry fans, due to the astonishing lack of violence throughout the rest of the movie. The violence of A History of Violence felt earned, especially in the big finale at the brother’s house. The violence throughout this movie doesn’t seem genuinely needed, due to the emphasis on more dialogue-heavy exposition. I actually found myself at times watching Eastern Promises wishing I were watching A History of Violence. I started this review more optimstic, but alas, I have to confront the disappointment I feel toward this film. While the majority of another recent release Into the Wild remains vivid in my memory, I’ve forgotten next to all of Eastern Promises. The next great Cronenberg movie it’s not.

2 stars (out of 4)