A History of Violence reviewed - 1/5

I would have given it a 0 but the fleshy disfigurements were nicely gross, though few and far between.

IMDB entry

Maybe I just didn't understand the film but as far as I could tell, there was nothing there worth sitting in a cinema for two hours to see. I didn't come out entertained, I didn't come out changed and I certainly didn't come out with the intriguing new take on Life, the Universe and Everything which I was hoping for, from the number of reviews that said "thought-provoking". I came out bored and disappointed and glad I hadn't paid £6.50 to see it.

Looking at the film from a cerebral point of view, the concepts of running away from your history and what really makes a person could have been intriguing, but nothing was ever fully explored. From the point of view of Tom, the film pretty unequivocally took one side and there was never enough revealed about the lives of his family members to discuss their natures. You can't come to any reasonable conclusion about someone based on two five-minute scenes from an extraordinary time in their life.
Menacing villains were portrayed very convincingly (the entire cast was excellent provided we pretend that Tom's daughter wasn't really there) but their characters were very two-dimensional. Despite the intriguing beginnings, this whole film set out to impart one message only, and that message was uninteresting and simplistic. And it didn't need half an hour of footage of cars driving around to tell it!

Good lord, does the man have a newfound fetish for cars? Every scene that was outdoors had an extra twenty seconds of car footage forced into it as if the entire film had been funded by one massive product placement. Even a simple scene like going to the mall had to have a long slow shot of the car driving into the car park. If there was some significance to the interminable shots of cars everywhere, please let me know. I get the menacing scary bits, but 3 full minutes of an uneventful drive to Philadelphia? Unless there were volumes of speech being conveyed by some finely tuned nuances to Viggo's driving and expressions that simply didn't penetrate my bored stupor, I don't see the point of that scene at all.

Looking at the film from an entertainment point of view there are a few funny bits, a few action bits and some good gore. The first third is intriguing and full of atmosphere but broken by the refreshingly realistic, yet stilted and unsexy sex scene (Viggo's I've-died-and-gone-to-heaven face just makes him look like he hasn't gotten laid in years). Sadly, the intrigue is sorely let down by the Philadelphia section of the film which is just simplistic and lame gangster cliché.

Lastly, a note to Viggo: I know you played Aragorn, the hardest man in Middle-Earth so you're not used to this, but even when you're playing a guy with the nickname "Crazy", you can't wince at the strain of moving your freshly-shot arm in one scene and then be obliviously swinging bags around a couple of hours later. Unless there's a deleted scene of athelas-bathing in the DVD.

Tagged: film