More on Eastern Promises.

"Good as all the actors are - [Vincent] Cassel, in particular, brings a few more tones to his portrayal than I suspected he had - this is [Viggo] Mortensen's show," writes Robert Cashill.

"It's remarkable how extraneous Mortensen's character, Nikolai, is to the early proceedings, because from the beginning he looms over the film," writes the New Republic's Christopher Orr.

Updated through 9/27.

"[G]eneric labels are relatively meaningless in describing the sensation experienced when engaging with [Eastern Promises]," writes Drew Morton at Dr Mabuse's Kaleido-Scope. "While the film begins rather conventionally with the rather gruesome murder of a Russian mobster that evokes both to the murder of Luca Brasi in Coppola's The Godfather and Cronenberg's earlier more visceral efforts, the pacing of the film dodges the rather typical three-act structure of most crime dramas. Instead, he lingers on sudden bursts of violence but, unlike his last film, Cronenberg does not seem as concerned with punishing the audience for their voyeurism. This time, he shifts focus to the faces of the men committing the deeds, derailing the forward momentum that violence normally has on the narrative."

"[I]t's a brisk and exciting film for the most part, Viggo and Vincent Cassel are a lot of fun to watch together, and, once again, it's only about 100 minutes long," writes Leo Goldsmith at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. "Hardly a glowing recommendation, I know, but middling Cronenberg is still more appealing than Russell Crowe's Glenn Ford impersonation or Jodie Foster's Charlie Bronson."

"To discuss Eastern Promises as another of [David] Cronenberg's body-horror shows is to somewhat obscure the fact that, as with 2005's A History of Violence, the film is firstly an underworld thriller emblazoned with an intense performance by Mortensen," writes Nick Schager. "But the urge to confront it on thematic terms is also driven by the fact that its subtextual currents are more compelling than the actual narrative itself, which never wholly coheres into something satisfyingly suspenseful."

"It's a movie that's a perfectly good drunken shag with an average partner, nothing that will blow your mind and nothing you haven't seen before," writes Grady Hendrix in a funny but also spoiler-ridden review for Twitch.

"I had just about given up on gangster films as a genre." But C Jerry Kutner lists fives ways this one works at Bright Lights After Dark.

"Eastern Promises is a sleek, claustrophobic thriller that's disappointing only because it's the follow-up to A History of Violence," writes Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog.

Paul Matwaychuk talks with Cronenberg.

In the UK: "Audiences will shortly have the chance to see two brilliant films, both made by North American directors, which explore the seedy underbelly of London in a poetic and atmospheric way," writes Geoffrey Macnab in the Independent. One is Eastern Promises. The other: "London is shown in an equally forlorn light in Jules Dassin's Night and the City (1950), which portrays a post-war London in the grip of hoodlums and racketeers. Thanks to the Blitz, there is rubble all over the place. Dassin throws in several sequences in which his lead character, the small-time US nightclub tout and would-be wrestling promoter Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark) is seen scurrying like a beetle across grey, decaying cityscapes with heavies in pursuit. Again, the Thames is where the bodies are dumped."

For Amazon, Cronenberg makes a list of " some things that I read and watched in preparation for the making of Eastern Promises."

Earlier: "Interview. David Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen."

"Mortensen is absolutely brilliant: stoic and sarcastic and threatening and, at moments, curiously soft," writes the Oregonian's Shawn Levy. "He somehow presents his face as a meerschaum topped with a subtle pompadour, and he makes three-course meals out of lines like "Sentimental value: I heard of that.'... Cronenberg has, as Guillermo del Toro did in Pan's Labyrinth, crafted both a drama and a fairy tale - and he's done it in an entertainment as cracking as you could wish for."

Updates, 9/23: "[T]he glaring difference between his two most recent films is that A History of Violence fetishized mechanical weaponry and its effects on bodies; malforming and mutilated them," writes Ted Pigeon. "However, there is not a single gunshot to be seen or heard in Eastern Promises, and yet many people lose their lives. It does not contain so much as one composition of an automatic weapon of any sort. Here, Cronenberg more explicitly focuses on bodies mutilating bodies and colliding with one another other."

For the first time, the Shamus is impressed by Viggo Mortensen:

He's dominating, he's sexy, he's mesmerizing, he's impossible to turn away from. He goes so deep into the role that he isn't anybody but this tatted-up, ex-con, Russian mobster harboring a dangerous secret.

But why listen to me? Here is what Geoffrey Rush, unbidden, told reporters at the Toronto International Film Festival while he was supposed to be promoting his own movie:

Viggo Mortensen gives a great screen performance. He's completely inside his imaginative world, creating a character using invisible technique. There's a great kind of personal stamp that's idiosyncratic for the character. He explores extreme parameters within the character on his own terms and therefore creates someting entertaining and thrilling for an audience to get involved with on their own imaginative level.

What's interesting is that Eastern Promises is far from a great movie....

Martin Tsai talks with Cronenberg for cinemaattraction.

Update, 9/25: "Eastern Promises is not about the brutal, multi-cultural underbelly beneath London's surface nor the society and culture of immigrant Russians, nor does it unexpectidly turn on its subject and corrode it from within, as with A History of Violence - surprisingly, neither the script nor the film seems to have thematic pretensions," writes Daniel Kasman. "But it is fascinated by this movie surface world it is indulging in, like an old Hollywood film..."

Update, 9/27: "In a kind of unexpected loop back to [Cronenberg's] past, the new film's vastly ranging social contexts of in-grown Russian émigrés, isolated Turkish circles and thoroughly Anglicized Russian ethnics acknowledges a far larger world and communities of people that's visible in his early horror films from The Brood to Scanners (1981) and Videodrome (1983)," writes Robert Koehler.

Posted by dwhudson at September 21, 2007 1:27 AM