A History of Violence (USA) (New Line) (2005) ***Year: 2005iMDB
Director: David Cronenberg Cast: Viggo Mortensen, Maria Bello, Ed Harris
One of the lauded films at this year's Cannes Festival, A History of Violence is not a bad movie, but jumps to the top of my "most overrated movies of the 2005" list.
Presumably David Cronenberg presents us with an allegory about the omni-presence of violence in our lives and the way it affects us when it surfaces. Tom Stall (Mortensen) lives a peaceful family life with wife and two kids in a small town in Indiana, until he is forced into action by two killers that attempt to rob his restaurant and threaten to kill one of the workers. He reacts swiftly and manages to kill the two, not without getting hurt himself. His quiet life is over after this incident as he is pulled into a series of events that uncover hidden aspects of his life, hidden treats in his son, while his whole family is swirled into the middle of an almost entirely different life.
Cronenberg's study fails however as I could not get over the over-abundance of stereotypes as well as over-simplistic sketches. The simple mid-western life that the Stall's were living seems to be depicted by someone that has never been in the midwest. The "East Coast" mobsters are over-the top villains whose language and actions seem just poorly ripped out of Sopranos while lacking any content.
Not all of the movie is bad. The scenes of violence, while extremely graphic are very well done and almost made me think of Kill Bill. The story manages to be compelling for significant periods of time, although every time you come to terms with a twist and you decide to accept it to see where the movie goes, the next element is at the same time both predictable and less believable than the one before.
If you want to see Viggo Mortensen turned into a hard-core killer, this is the movie for you. But I wasn't able to find any deeper meaning to David Cronenberg's latest - just a mix of stereotypes and over-simplified characters in a story that is so unbelievable that it's obviously not the point of the movie.
Posted by TheCasualCritic on October 22, 2005 05:50 PM