journal features

movie review - A History of Violence

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Vancouver, 2006.01.05

This is an extremely violent gangster flick that starts with a fellow in a small town who's making a living with a greasy spoon. He's got a loving (and smoking hot) wife and all is well. Then two thugs arrive in town, and violence breaks out leaving the intruders dead.

Our hero, maybe an ex-mafia killer, comes out on top but in doing so he makes the news. That causes old enemies from his past to seek him out, and from that point on the body count begins to spiral ever upward. His brother leads the charge, full of accusations of betrayal and hardship.

I enjoyed it as far as it goes. It's an unchallenging plot that focuses more on characters than real conflict despite all the bullets flying. I can't imagine seeing it again. What makes this worth watching are the performances of both the reformed killer and his wife. Both actors are spot on. Unfortunately, the story seems to be trying a bit too hard to be the hip, taut drama and comes off as somewhat stilted. Especially in the final act, which frankly feels like a different movie, a conclusion that they'd made because they'd no alternative after the rest of the film was made.

Not recommended.

rand()m quote

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

—Michael Crichton