Pros: That the dvd didn't come with something sharp to harm myself with.
Cons: That the dvd didn't come with something sharp to harm myself with.
The Bottom Line: Not the worst movie ever, but it would be on an top ten for most dull.
Plot Details: This opinion reveals everything about the movie''s plot.
Never have I been so bored by a movie where so many people die.
Two words always come to mind when the name David Cronenberg is mentioned: crepuscular and gooey. A History of Violence was crepuscular enough, and the goo factor (usually by way of organic monstrosities in movies like Naked Lunch, Video Drome, eXinstenZ, and Scanners) is mostly just blood from fights and shootings. Yawn, someone wake me when something unpredictable happens.
Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) is a small town diner operator who stops what would be a deadly robbery of his diner. After this, the name and face of the otherwise unknown Tom Stall gets spread about. Then, as luck would have it, some gangsters from the overly paved east coast arrive in a small farm town in Indiana. Mistaken identity? Is Tom found out? Does it matter? For the sake of the notion of this film being a sucky way to spend 90 minutes: Tom is found out and no it doesn’t matter. If this movie were attached to a heart rate monitor it would have flatlined the whole way through. However on the way to pulling the plug (credits beneficently rolling) something on the order of 13 people are dead. There are shoot-em-up movies that are good where only half that many die. You could literally have shot one person per frame of film for this turkey and it would still have been overwhelmingly dull.
There were some half-hearted attempts to make the film work as a narrative. Tom is married to Edie (Maria Bello) and has two children—who cares what their names are, they are just tacked on so that Tom can be portrayed as a family man. There is some sort of tacked on subplot with the son that mimics the violence that his father does.
It seems that someone called Joey Cusack, former muscle for a Philadelphia mob syndicate, decided he had had enough of the whole killing for money and kicks thing. So he goes and reinvents himself. All is well and good until he kills two thieves. Then his old life comes back to haunt him. Big deal.
What is most striking in this is just how badly everyone acts. Apart from the town drunk and town idiot, there is not one stock character from rural town or gangster that this movie didn’t pull out of the dusty hopeless-chest. I kept waiting for something to happen, anything. This is a Cronenberg movie. C’mon, when is the house going to turn into some oozing bug and swallow up the whole family? There are tears in this movie, just standard tears, not some ooze that comes from the brain that has been overdosed with some sort of new chemical. Cronenberg doesn’t do tears and broken hearts, he does gross oozing things that shoot teeth instead of bullets and hearts broken when a hand reaches through the television and squashes it like a bug. And don’t get me started again on bugs.
The problem is that the story is so bad that no director could have saved it. It needed to be rewritten or just shelved. Yes, shelved. That would have been excellent. Lots of people tried to act in this film and there was a relatively decent amount of fake blood (though there were a few headshots with nasty bullets, there was no gray matter—kind of like the director getting soft, or hard, or something but how about just less gross). But it was all a wasted effort.
You see, I finally didn’t care. So the family gets self-righteous that Tom may have been someone else before they knew him as Tom? So what? I see people as a series of roles rather than as a fully finished person—this means that people are allowed to change if they desire. So they can all claim to be victims of a lie, but the person they know as Tom never gave them any indication that he was other than Tom. We have the ability to walk away from one life and start another—if you aren’t doing anything illegal, you just use your same name and social security number and just start a new life in a new city. I know at least one person who has done this.
The reason I mentioned that at all is to say that this is a movie where—even despite the rather large number of corpses—nothing really happens.
If you are contemplating watching this movie, set a timer and create a 90 minute story all by yourself—it will be better, free, and not a waste of time.
Recommended:
No
