Eastern Promises
Director David Cronenberg
basically resurrected his career with last year's collaboration with Viggo
Mortensen in the acclaimed A History of Violence.
Mortensen is along for the
ride again for the follow-up, and while the Russian mafia melodrama
Eastern Promises is not up to the standard of their last team-up, it
still is a crisp and tense thriller.
Eastern Promises
takes a look at the complicated and violent lives of gangsters in a Russian
section of London.
Naomi Watts plays Anna, a
midwife of mixed descent (half-Russian, half-English) who gets dragged into
the underworld when she treats a 14-year-old pregnant immigrant who is
attacked right before she is to give birth. When the girl dies but the
baby survives, she only has the girl's diary in Russian to find out
who she is and if she has family who can take care of the baby.
She finds a business card
to a restaurant and supper club in the diary. When she goes there,
trying to find if anyone knew the girl or if they could translate her diary
for a name or address, she stumbles into a viper's nest of drugs,
trafficking, prostitution and murder.
Only two people seem to be
willing to help her. One is the friendly-but-suspicious restaurateur
(Armin Mueller-Stahl) who runs the place. The other is a new limo
driver (Mortensen) who is quickly making his way up the ranks of the
organization.
The film is in general
rather interesting, though it does have a tendency to flip back and forth
between segments which border on dull followed by graphic violence.
One warning, though.
The movie relies on a plot twist, one which does not play out until about
3/4 of the way through the film and one that I will not disclose for sake of
not ruining a surprise. However this twist was not a revelation to me
because it was matter-of-factly exposed in almost everything I have
previously read about the film. In fact, I was surprised when this
fact was not made clear right away because I had assumed it was a
fundamental fact of the story. Then I spent much of the film wondering
if the writers could have gotten something so basic wrong. It turned
out they hadn't but this prior knowledge ruined the film's biggest shock.
If you have read anything else about the movie, you will probably quickly
notice this as well so if you haven't, wait until you see the film before
reading further stories on it.
Dave Strohler
Copyright ©2008 PopEntertainment.com. All rights reserved.
Posted: January 3, 2008.
