Review of Eastern Promises

Rating: 4.5 Stars (Out of 5)

It is not every day I get the outstanding pleasure of being gripped by a movie as thrilling as Eastern Promises. The movie has the same addictive grip as a high adrenaline movie like Casino Royale with a fraction of the violence. It simply, from start to finish, tells a gripping story.

Viggo Mortensen finally makes a clean break from Aragorn in my mind in this role, as he plays a scary Russian mob driver named Nikolai Luzhin. Throughout the movie, the character is beautifully played. While he could easily have been a purely ruthless thug or a reluctant killer, Mortensen beautifully bridges the gap, calling to mind (and perhaps ecclipsing) Johnny Depp's role in Donnie Brasco.

Mortensen stands out as the protagonist, but all of the characters in the movie were well played with perhaps the exception of the mob boss Semyon, who was a little too quiet to be scary. Jerzy Skolimowski stole my heart as the mean-softy Russian step-father. The rest of the onscreen family, Naomi Watts and Sinéad Cusack were also excellent.

Besides the gripping narrative, one thing that I absolutely love about this film is that it has a small cast. Sure, it is easy to make a movie compelling when the director has hundreds of extras to toss about. The core cast of the film consisted of eight actors, and the viewer intimately gets to know each character.

There are a few reasons that I cannot give this film a perfect 10. One, as my first review, I would look like a pushover. Two (and more importantly), the film was a trifle gory. I understand in a Russian Mob movie people will die, but when you make me look away from the screen I am going to get a little peeved. Frankly, Sweeny Todd has really just made me adverse to seeing throats be slit.

Additionally, while the story was compelling and brilliantly acted from start to finish, it lacked the magic spark of Casablanca or The Godfather. It's a grim movie about a grim story, and so it is hard to really want to be any of the characters in the film, making it not connect with me on that deeper, 10.0 level.

Eastern Promises was released September 21, 2007. It grossed $17.26 Million in the US.