Film

The provocative Cronenberg has clearly not moved beyond his own history of violence: Eastern Promises has not one but two gory throat-slittings, the onscreen removal of a dead man’s fingers—and a stunningly choreographed fight scene in a bathhouse in which a naked Mortensen battles two fully clothed thugs with knives, and no one comes out unscathed. Mortensen can take on a couple of armed guys in the altogether because he’s a Russian mob chauffeur in London with a sideline in fixing problems, if you catch our drift. And his boss has a doozy of a problem when a junkie prostitute dies in childbirth, leaving behind a diary full of incriminating info. That book falls into the hands of Anna (Watts), who can’t read Russian but knows enough to distrust the Russian mob.

Eastern alternates between spasms of shocking violence and long stretches of slowly building menace. Mortensen, who was such a convincing regular guy in History of Violence, plays in a broader register here, conveying stony menace and frightening competence. As father and son mobsters, Mueller-Stahl and Cassel also paint their characters in large familiar strokes (scary but avuncular mob boss, drunken son anxious to fill his daddy’s shoes), but in the bright, shiny, slightly surreal world Cronenberg creates, it all makes sense. Watts is less at ease, perhaps because Cronenberg and screenwriter Steve Knight (Dirty Pretty Things) are so obviously more interested in how men interact with each other, whether they’ve got knives in their hands or just in their words.