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David Cronenberg has attracted a lot of controversy during his career but it was one of his most conventional films yet that generated considerable acclaim and brought him back into the spotlight in 2005. A History of Violence, while containing more explicit sex and violence than we are perhaps used to in mainstream Hollywood fare, was by Cronenberg standards quite tame. With Eastern Promises he follows it with a superficially similar tale starring the same actor, Viggo Mortensen. This time, instead of dealing with the mob in small town America, the director trains his camera on London's Russian gangster underworld, a group which has not really been well represented on film before. However, Mortensen and the gangster theme are pretty much all the films have in common. A History of Violence's extremely episodic structure, due to its graphic novel roots - arguably a flaw of that film - is replaced by a fairly intricate narrative with no particular main character. Like Violence, Mortensen dominates the film, but this time the film does not completely revolve around him. That proves ultimately to be a flaw; without a central focus, Eastern Promises' pace suffers and there are long stretches that allow interest to wane.
The catalyst of the story is the death of a young pregnant Russian girl due to complications with delivering the baby. Naomi Watts' Anna is a midwife, who takes the girl's diary in order to find out who she is, but it is in Russian so she needs it translating. The content of the diary proves to be far from harmless, indicting several members of the Russian mob in murder and identifying the father of her child. When the Russians find out about it they, predictably, want to keep its secrets hidden. Watts is reliably solid but occasionally seems constrained by her British accent and is upstaged by the sheer presence of Mortensen, who takes a limited role and imprints his personality onto it. Mortensen's Nikolai is the driver/henchman of Kirill, played by Frenchman Vincent Cassel, the son of the head of the Russian mob in London. The occasionally erratic Cassel delivers a generally solid performance.
Although Eastern Promises has a rather promising start (no pun intended), the story begins to drift rather aimlessly at times. It will be remembered most for a extraordinary scene in a sauna, in which Mortensen proves his dedication to the role. The trailers and publicity, based a lot on A History of Violence's favourable reception, have been somewhat misleading because there is actually little violence here. What there is occurs in generally short, sharp and shocking bursts and its in these few scenes where Cronenberg stamps his mark on the picture. Between these scenes, however, there is a lack of intrigue, suspense and, surprisingly, directorial flair, hampered by a script that never really comes to life. When the aforementioned sauna sequence occurs around the start of the third act it momentarily increases interest again and suggests that the slow periods earlier were worth the wait. Sadly, that proves not to be the case and the plot just fizzles out to an entirely unremarkable conclusion.
The summary
Not terrible, but completely indistinctive - not a description that normally applies to David Cronenberg films - and sometimes boring. Mortensen is better than the material.
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