This film is poised somewhere neatly between being great and unique and being rather pedestrian and forgettable. On the negative side of the balance, there's a plot structure that one hopes would be more complex, but which ends up being as contrived as an early 20th Century film melodrama -- the orphaned baby in the hospital, threatened by ethnic gangsters... the all-too-obvious secret agent who blows his own cover but gets away with it... etc. On the other hand, Viggo Mortensen gives a decent performance, affected accent aside, and Vincent Cassel is brilliant. There are some pretty cool violent action scenes, which might be a positive or a negative for different people -- the director Cronenberg has often been accused of needless gore, while his defenders often argue that gore is a style and a manner of formalism for him. Eastern Promises always seems to hang just on the precipice of bad taste and even sheer stupidity, and the artistic accomplishment to which these ends are used is questionable in the end.
An orphaned baby's mother leaves behind a diary with all kinds of mafia secrets which is discovered and for some reason allowed to remain in the possession of the nurse on duty at the time (Naomi Watts) instead of the police. Leaving aside the fact that the diary plot device is more stale than Shakespeare allusions, the movie then throws in this chauffeur character (Mortensen), and the audience can tell within 5 minutes that he knows way more than Cassel's character and is probably a secret agent. However, this possibility never occurs even to the hardened mafia types after the chauffeur arranges for a whore he slept with to be arrested and sent back to her home. One is left by the end of the movie, after witnessing this mafia's inept attempts to protect itself from a very obvious threat, to wonder how they could possibly have stayed in power for more than a few weeks.
Cassel is the main saving grace of the film -- as a self-tortured repressed homosexual who's always dangerously close to releasing his energy in the form of violence on relatively innocent people, his volatile energy keeps the film going. The performances in general are very good, as Cronenberg knows how to work with the actor to bring out something interesting regardless of the material. But it's a shame to see the director and the cast trying to put meat on such a poor animal's bones. I greatly preferred the previous Mortensen/Cronenberg collaboration, "A History of Violence." There were some moments of this film that seemed to reach for territory even beyond that film's deliberately limited pallet, but the structure of the story wasn't strong enough for me to support or sustain those moments.
I see "Eastern Promises" as an interesting failure. Ultimately the characters are more interesting than anything in the story, which is not inherently bad but is rather demanding towards the actors. Most carried through in this film, but it lacked a certain focus and vitality that the best films should have.
An orphaned baby's mother leaves behind a diary with all kinds of mafia secrets which is discovered and for some reason allowed to remain in the possession of the nurse on duty at the time (Naomi Watts) instead of the police. Leaving aside the fact that the diary plot device is more stale than Shakespeare allusions, the movie then throws in this chauffeur character (Mortensen), and the audience can tell within 5 minutes that he knows way more than Cassel's character and is probably a secret agent. However, this possibility never occurs even to the hardened mafia types after the chauffeur arranges for a whore he slept with to be arrested and sent back to her home. One is left by the end of the movie, after witnessing this mafia's inept attempts to protect itself from a very obvious threat, to wonder how they could possibly have stayed in power for more than a few weeks.
Cassel is the main saving grace of the film -- as a self-tortured repressed homosexual who's always dangerously close to releasing his energy in the form of violence on relatively innocent people, his volatile energy keeps the film going. The performances in general are very good, as Cronenberg knows how to work with the actor to bring out something interesting regardless of the material. But it's a shame to see the director and the cast trying to put meat on such a poor animal's bones. I greatly preferred the previous Mortensen/Cronenberg collaboration, "A History of Violence." There were some moments of this film that seemed to reach for territory even beyond that film's deliberately limited pallet, but the structure of the story wasn't strong enough for me to support or sustain those moments.
I see "Eastern Promises" as an interesting failure. Ultimately the characters are more interesting than anything in the story, which is not inherently bad but is rather demanding towards the actors. Most carried through in this film, but it lacked a certain focus and vitality that the best films should have.