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Kevin Michael Vance
Writer - Portland, Oregon
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Title: A History of Violence
Director: David Cronenberg
Year: 2005
Reviewed: October 06, 2005
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Birthday Cake-Second Highest Rating |
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Let me see… "A History of Violence", gets from me a BIRTHDAY CAKE review.
Two things struck me when I sat down and the film started to roll: one- it was directed by David Cronenberg. I mean, this is the guy who did Scanners, The Fly, Existence, Dead Ringers and the incredibly strange and twisted Crash. So I knew History of Violence would either be something special, or it just might fall flat. Second- it was based on a graphic novel. Now I like graphic novels and comic books. I don't know what novel spawned A History of Violence, but I have to admit I cringed. Except for a couple outstanding exceptions movies based off either comic books or video games have a tendency to suck (and not in a good way, either).
Now, did History suck… well, not really, but neither did it excel in any real exceptional way. I have to admit, barring the over-the-top scenes of violence, which, I might stress, I enjoyed, I was pretty well bored with the film. The script is nothing special and the characters were rather flat and dispassionate, and this punctuated by spot-lighted scenes of intensely detailed gore. There were a couple of sex scenes that felt just as over-the-top as some of the violence. Now Cronenberg could have been following the graphic novel to the line and letter, but a comic book does not a movie make.
Basically, I think History lacks a sense of cohesion. This point, proved even further when we, the viewers, reach the end of the film. I liked the end. No. I should say, I really liked the end, essentially act III. Act III is sharp, witty, poignant, and something the bulk of the film is not… hilarious. It's a great melding of scenes with Viggo killing mob men as if they were mere bugs and Willam Hurt glancing about in disgust at the ineptitude of his cronies. This was good. And it made me think that Cronenberg should have come at this film in an entirely different manner. If he had made the bulk of the film like the end… THEN we might have a movie. But he did not. He chose to create, or rather, attempted to create a sense of realism at the beginning.
With Cronenberg happily focusing on the visceral grittiness of his characters horrifically violent tendencies, however, History is never able to attain a sense of that realism, or the dark "campy-ness" of the end. This makes A History of Violence unsure of itself, at times timid, at times bold, at times tedious, and at times gut-bustingly funny, and moreover kind of a bloody mess, with no real sense of it's self, or the path and lives of its characters.
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