Eastern Promises
Studio: Focus Features
Rated: R
Cast: Viggo Mortensen, Naomi Watts
Director: David Cronenberg
WorkNameSort: Eastern Promises
Our Rating: 4.00
Eastern Promises proves two things: First, director David Cronenberg knows how to end a movie better than just about anybody else in the business and, second, Viggo Mortensen is the greatest American actor that nobody in America cares about. Like their last collaboration, A History of Violence, the two further explore the human propensity for behaving in inhuman ways. Unfortunately, much like Violence, it’s largely impossible to explain the breadth of this theme without ruining the ending Cronenberg has ingeniously crafted. Eastern Promises and A History of Violence could be viewed as cinematic brothers, except that, in Promises, Mortensen plays a killer involved with a bloody Russian mob rather than a killer involved with a bloody Philadelphia mob. Also, Promises, which tackles the British sex trade, has more social heft than its predecessor; there’s something epic about it, despite its cramped presentation. Ultimately, though, that intimate scope is necessary, as it turns into a story of futility in the face of a criminal network so big that no movie could capture it.
This article appears in Sep 19-25, 2007.