Camden New Journal - Movies: Eastern Promises

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The Review - AT THE MOVIES with WILLIAM HALL
Published: 25 October 2007

Vincent Cassell and Viggo Mortensen play members of an eastern European crime family in London

Mafia brutality could be a big hit

EASTERN PROMISES
Directed by David Cronenberg
Certificate 18

WE get a taste of unpleasant things to come in a grisly opening scene in a barber’s shop. Outside the windows the rain is teeming down on dark London streets. Inside, a customer is having his throat sliced with a cut-throat razor.
Director David Cronenberg is telling us he’s back, establishing a mood of menace and intrigue from reel one.
The barber, grizzled and avuncular, is Russian, and so is the hitman he has hired to carry out the cold-blooded murder.
Enter a mysterious and enigmatic figure named Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen, the star of Cronenberg’s acclaimed History of Violence), with a face like a tombstone and a personality to match. His day job is driver for one of the most notorious crime families from eastern Europe operating in London, but at night he takes on the mantle of bodyguard to the godfather (Armin Mueller-Stahl).
His life is complicated by his partner (Vincent Cassell), a psychotic enforcer for the family who prefers to kick in doors rather than open them. When a young nurse (Naomi Watts) stumbles on a secret diary detailing the family’s ill-gotten fortunes and takes it to the bodyguard, the bullets start to fly.
There has been a big buzz about this film, and Cronenberg pulls out all the stops to justify it.
But he fails to keep up the pace of what could and should have been a tension-filled action drama with a gripping theme about the Russian mafia – even though he does give us one sensational sequence set in a steam bath when the naked Nikolai finds himself up against two knife-wielding Chechen assassins.
This is brutal stuff. You’ll be looking through your fingers, or more likely not looking at all.
Otherwise the action sags in the middle like an old mattress, with long slabs of dialogue that left me yawning and in some confusion when it came to working out exactly who was killing who, and why.

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