Eastern Promises – Memphis Flyer

A subterranean favorite best known for “body horror” flicks (They Came From Within), coal-black comedies (The Brood), squishy remakes (The Fly), and outré exercises (Crash — the car-wreck sex-cult movie, not the platitude-packed Oscar winner), the superb Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg went mainstream a couple of years ago with A History of Violence. A director-for-hire studio product, the film boasted Cronenberg’s biggest budget ever and marked his first film set in the United States since 1983’s The Dead Zone. But as mainstream entertainment, A History of Violence was a bit of a Trojan horse. It honored Hollywood convention but only in the service of interrogating it.

On the surface, Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises is an aesthetic sequel to A History of Violence. Both films open with bloody, unsettling pre-credit sequences. Both cast Viggo Mortensen as an outwardly calm man capable of great violence and pair him with a striking blonde (Maria Bello in Violence, Naomi Watts in Eastern Promises). And both films chart the disruptive intersection of a seedy criminal underworld and middle-class domestic normalcy.

But where Violence only seemed old-fashioned, Eastern Promises really is. Emotionally and morally, A History of Violence left the viewer in an uncertain, unsettling place. Eastern Promises‘ denouement is more abrupt and less tidy, but it sets the moral world in order in the manner Hollywood films are expected to.

But if Eastern Promises is a less ambitious film than is the norm for Cronenberg, it’s still a fine one. A filmmaker of great technical skill and visual economy, Cronenberg hooks the viewer from the beginning with a crisp opening sequence that sets the entire plot in motion with two deaths and a birth. You can further sense his sure hand with the way key bits of back story are parceled out.

Eastern Promises was written by Steven Knight and covers the same London-immigrant-underworld milieu as his Dirty Pretty Things. Here, Watts plays Anna, a midwife of mixed British and Russian ancestry who pockets the diary of a hemorrhaging, unidentified 14-year-old who dies while giving birth. Attempting to translate the diary in order to find the newborn’s family, Anna is pulled into the world of the London-based Russian mob, led by menacing restaurateur Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl) and his weak, erratic son Kirill (Vincent Cassel). Kirill’s mysterious driver/bodyguard Nikolai (Mortensen) takes a protective interest in Anna.

Mortensen’s Nikolai is a classic screen creation. A brooding, mysterious, and dangerous figure, Nikolai’s body is covered in prison tattoos that are markers of experience within the Russian mob. These tattoos take on a key narrative role when they’re used by a couple of revenge-seeking Chechens to (mis)identify Nikolai in a bathhouse. The ensuing savage, two-on-one knife attack is the film’s centerpiece, with Mortensen’s full nudity ratcheting up the vulnerability and queasiness of the scene.

Though Mortensen’s Nikolai is iconic, Watts also functions as part of the visual design, seen often riding a motorcycle through the London streets in a constellation of black — jacket, boots, helmet, sunglasses — broken up by blond hair and tight blue jeans.

If this visually striking, expertly directed film falls short of Cronenberg’s usual standards, it’s because of a script that’s too conventional, something underscored by a key revelation about Nikolai’s motivation that suggests a lesser, more procedurally oriented crime film than what Eastern Promises strives to be.

Eastern Promises

Opening Friday, September 21st

Multiple locations

The day before I saw Shoot ‘Em Up, I attended an advance screening of Eastern Promises, the latest film (set to open in Memphis September 21st) from brilliant Canadian director David Cronenberg. Both films feature scenes in which a male protagonist (Clive Owen in Shoot ‘Em Up, Viggo Mortensen in Eastern Promises) is attacked in a bathroom by a knife-wielding baddie.

If you want a demonstration of the gulf that separates concept from execution, especially in regard to action cinema, then see these two movies and juxtapose these similar scenes. The bathroom (bath house, actually) battle in Eastern Promises is bracing and uncomfortable. With minimal camera movement or editing, you feel the physicality of the action and the force of Mortensen’s performance. In Shoot ‘Em Up, the action is so dark, blurry, shaky, and chopped up, you may find yourself squinting and bobbing your head to try and get a better look. There are novel ideas in the scene — Owen uses the heat from the automated hand dryer to force his attacker to drop his weapon — but they get lost in the noise and clutter. And so it is with much of Shoot ‘Em Up‘s breathless, overheated 86 minutes.

Shoot ‘Em Up — which pits Owen as everyman action hero against Paul Giamatti’s scenery-chomping criminal commando — goes gonzo less than five minutes in, as a pregnant woman flees a gun-brandishing predator by ducking into an empty warehouse. Innocent bystander Owen comes to the woman’s rescue and ends up delivering her baby while fighting off a dozen or so attackers in a lavish gun battle as remixed Nirvana pounds away on the soundtrack.

The scenario is like something from a John Woo film (think Hard Boiled or The Killer), but where Woo instilled his ridiculously grandiose action set pieces with near-guileless conviction, writer/director Michael Davis makes self-consciousness his very mission. As a result, Shoot ‘Em Up aims to come across as something like a compendium of Woo highlights as filtered through the artificial, ironic video game/graphic novel/cartoon sensibilities of movies such as The Matrix, Sin City, and Raising Arizona.

Davis is more a scenarist than screenwriter, as Shoot ‘Em Up is packed with cool action-scene ideas. There’s a baby on a merry-go-round targeted by a villainous shooter, the child’s good-guy protector shooting at the handle to spin the contraption around and foul up the assassin’s shot. There’s a Rube Goldberg series of booby-trapped gun devices Owen’s hero uses to slay a score of foils in a firearms factory.

One scene has Owen and Italian screen goddess Monica Bellucci having sex while bad guys burst in, forcing Owen to grab a gun and finish off his attacker while he’s finishing off Bellucci. In concept, that’s gold. In execution, it somehow manages to underwhelm.

Though some ideas are rewarded with commensurate follow-though — a head-on car collision Owen uses to catapult himself into better shooting position, a skydiving shoot-out that ends with a static wide shot of downed villains littering a field like mosquitoes on a windshield — most aren’t. Too often in Shoot ‘Em Up, editing and effects reign over real human movement or inspired camera movement or placement. Blurry, hectic visuals attempt to scam the viewer into the illusion of great action scenes that aren’t quite there. The result is too often as tedious as watching a video game rather than playing one.

Shoot ‘Em Up

Now playing

Multiple locations