Ed Howard, 17/06/2008
David Cronenberg's "Eastern Promises" is a relatively straightforward action thriller for the director better known for grotesque "body horror" and psychological dramas. The film represents, as the opening two scenes make clear, the intersection of birth and death in the milieu of Russian crime families based out of London. Right from the start, Cronenberg shows both a birth and a murder, making each of them equally gory and visceral, an appropriate equivalence since both scenes are linked to the same Russian underworld. This intertwining of mortality and new life extends even into the characters of the Russian hitman Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen) and the maternity ward nurse Anna (Naomi Watts), who is pulled into Nikolai's dark world by her attempts to uncover the secrets of the baby she helps deliver at the beginning of the film. Cronenberg handles the thriller plot with verve and wit, and Mortensen gives a phenomenal performance as the hard-edged killer whose body tells the story, in tattoos and scars, of his rough past. This theme becomes most apparent in the movie's already legendary bath-house fight scene, in which a completely naked Mortensen brutally fends off a pair of attackers. This scene, with Mortensen spiritually as well as physically naked, is the culmination of the film's undercurrent of exploring identity and violence as embodied in the human form. This is a smart, economically told thriller with an intensity practically unmatched in modern action cinema. Only Cronenberg could reinvigorate the moldy genre of the mob picture with such psychological density and raw energy.
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