Oscar Cleanup: EASTERN PROMISES review

EASTERN PROMISES

** out of 4
Rated R

Directed by David Cronenberg

ACADEMY AWARD NOMINEE: Best Actor-Viggo Mortenson

"I'm from Cah-Nah-Dah, but people think I'm slow, eh?"

-THE SIMPSONS

Film critics of any stripe get a bad rap for liking boring, impenetrable movies that the man on the street wouldn't shell out admission price to see; French people staring at bicycles and whatnot. But just a cursory glance at most of last year's top ten lists will put that rumor to bed... Or at least mine. Only two people put 30 DAYS OF NIGHT on their top ten lists for the year. Me and NO ONE.

But there is one guy who has turned boredom into an artform. One man among many who can take subjects like people turning into flies, screwing during car crashes and normal men going on extraordinary rampages into movies as dull as the shine on an old penny... And that man is Canadian Human Sominex Pill, David Cronenberg.

Good ol' Maple Leaf Dave insists on making films that rely on action in spite of the fact that he doesn't know how to shoot or edit it. He draws big name actors in spite of the fact that he makes them look amateurish and bland, with victims ranging from Christopher Walken to the woefully underrated Maria Bello. That THE DEAD ZONE is Cronenberg's best movie has less to do with Maple Leaf Dave, and more to do with Stephen King's outstanding source material.

But Typhoid Stevie ain't here to save EASTERN PROMISES, a tale of Russian mobsters in England that moves with the speed and grace of a molasses spill. I can just imagine Maple Leaf Dave standing behind the camera, bullwhip in hand, screaming "If any of you even THINKS about showing an emotion, IT'S BACK TO THE RACK WITH YOU!" EASTERN PROMISES clings to understatement like the stench of crazy clings to Tom Cruise.

Naomi Watts, the best actress in the world although you wouldn't know it from her work here, plays Anna. She's a midwife in London who admits a pregnant fourteen-year-old who is hemmoraging badly. They were able to save the baby, but the motrher dies, leaving behind only a diary, written in Russian. While getting it translated to find relatives the baby could go to live with, she is drawn into the world of Vory V Zakone, the Russian Mob.

They are led by Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), a restaurant owner. He has a son, Kirill (Mathieu Kassovitz) to do most of his groundwork along with the family driver Nikolai, played by Viggo Mortensen's strangely prominent forehead... The rest of him is in it as well, but it's mostly forehead.

Anything else that occurs, does so at about half the speed needed to get it done. I paused the movie to get a drink and I was shocked that only a half an hour went by instead of the hour I thought had elapsed. To call EASTERN PROMISES "sedate" is like calling Roger Clemens "a little liberal with the truth." Movies about Russian gangster shouldn't resemble trips to the grocery store, where there's no excitement and no humor and no emotion and no DEPTH.

A lot of that has to do with the acting, which I will not blame on the actors. Cronenberg is either unwilling or incapable of protecting his actors, seeming to somehow flatten them. He gives them emotional scenes to play and seems to instruct them to act as though their ordering off of a menu. How he does this has eluded me for the longest time, until I saw how horrible he makes Naomi Watts look in this film. In almost every scene in the film, he makes her look like an amateur by...

-Rolling the camera, showing us Watts absolutely inert.

-Watts then has to work herself into the tone of the scene ALL OF A SUDDEN.

It makes it look as though Watts is a half a beat slow all throughout the picture. And Cronenberg does this with all his actors, awkwardly framing them, or not cutting at the right time. Give any kid in any AV club in America an A-List cast and some ritalin to slow him down some, and by God, HE WILL MAKE A DAVID CRONENBERG MOVIE!

I know that Maple Leaf Dave has entered the front ranks of the world's directors and he has an assload of followers, so I can just hear the arguments now. "Cronenberg just wants realism. Would you rather have wild overacting?"

I'd rather have SOMETHING! And if Cronenberg had the slightest bit of interest in realism, he wouldn't have had that goofy-ass fight scene. You know, the one that's getting all the attention, where Viggo fights in the sauna wearing nothing but fake tattoos? It's blocked like a WWE Triple Threat match. In every one of those, one of the three guys is knocked to the outside of the ring so the other two can fight, with the other coming in for a surprise save when you least expect it. No one--NO ONE--fights like that. And they break out these martial arts moves that absolutely NO ONE uses. There's a difference between "Russian Hitman" and "Navy SEAL."

Oddly enough, the same thing happened in A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, and no one complained there either, except for me.

And it's apparent that Maple Leaf Dave and writer Steve Knight know as much about Russia as I do, and I know jackshit. Instead of, say, showing us something we didn't know about or building an original character, they opt to trot out the two big cliches that have been in use since the height of the Cold War: They all drink Vodka (and pronounce it "wodka") and there is actually a scene where the Mueller-Stahl character cooks Borscht.

FUN FACT: In Soviet Russia, Borscht eats... Ah, nevermind.

In fact, only one person gets out of EASTERN PROMISES scott-free and that Viggo the Carpathian. In a movie where everyone is dialed back down to one, Mortenson's character is the only character where that's actually appropriate. It reminds me of what Eddie Griffin said about Gangsta Rappers. "If you're a gangster, that means you live by a code of silence. If you're a rapper, it means YOU TALK TOO GODDAMN MUCH!"

But did they HAVE to make him look like Frankenstein? No wonder he never used a gun in the movie. 'Cause FIRE BAD!

EASTERN PROMISES is straight-forward gangster boilerplate, which wouldn't be bad if there were someone who could puch it up and make it flashy and enjoyable. And I wouldn't mind a movie being this slow, as long as there was some depth or meaning. But it's the worst of both worlds, but if David Cronenberg's name is on it, armchair intellectuals come-a-runnin'.

Don't let me stop you. I'll be watching something else.