Eastern Promises

After their History of Violence, can Cronenberg and Mortensen's follow-up deliver on its promises?

While this is no intended sequel it still depends on what you thought you'd been promised. Another convincing, layered and shrouded personality from Mortensen, certainly. A stylish stare into a criminal underworld, without doubt. Cronenberg's tempered, visceral and textured tones, of course. But a credible clutch of characters one and all, no. A note perfect screenplay, not quite. A totally compelling film, sadly not always.

Naomi Watts plays Anna Khitrova, a midwife drawn to the tragic circumstances of a pregnant 14-year-old Russian prostitute brought to the north London hospital where she works. The young mother dies as her baby is delivered, leaving Anna feeling compelled to leaf through the girl's diary to trace the orphan's relatives. As it's written in Russian she first asks her bad-tempered old skool Ruskie uncle Stepan (Skolimowski) to translate. After a brief look he vehemently warns her off, much to her mother (Cusack)'s consternation.

Nevertheless, Anna follows a business card from within the diary to the velvet-cosseted Trans-Siberian club and its kindly owner, Semyon (Mueller-Stahl), who agrees to help her. She also meets Semyon's pugnacious son, Kirill (Cassell), and their softly spoken driver, Nikolai (Mortensen). Seeing as the patriarchal Semyon actually heads a violent family of Eastern European gangsters, itself part of the notoriously brutal - and real life - Vory V Zakone criminal brotherhood, Anna is soon in over her head and in palpable danger. As Semyon moves to protect his own, the seemingly emotionally sterile Nikolai appears to be drawn to the wholesome Anna, a move that could risk more than just their lives.

Watts' Anna provides both our vehicle into the Russian criminal world and the initial moral standpoint for the film. Of course she is outraged at the sex slave and drug trafficking trades she partially lifts a lid on; who isn't? Sadly, there is then little more for the game Watts to work with, except for Anna's contrived personal motivation and a convincing crack at an English accent. It's Mortensen's commanding central performance as the slick Nikolai, a seemingly entrenched and impassive gangster coolly snipping corpse fingers towards promotion within the brotherhood, that sucks the weight of the film towards it like a black hole.

As in A History of Violence, Mortensen's man is never fully in the spotlight, never fully revealed, and he creates a fine balance of subtle character nuances that both reveal and cloak his Nikola. It's another darkly intriguing and convincing delivery. He's ably matched by Mueller-Stahl's inherent gravitas, bringing a deliciously sweet mix of paternal concern and considered violence to his New European don. In comparison, the unfortunate Cassel overacts to compensate for the standard mafia psycho-son role he's relegated to.

Steve Knight's screenplay must bear some responsibility for this. While his scope has grown in stature since his Dirty Pretty Things, similarly set in London's guilty underbelly, there's a less convincingly constructed reality here due to the paucity of depth amongst some of his dramatis personae. Aside from Nikolai, we've seen these people before. The London-Russian connection may be new in the genre, but there's actually little else that's innovative about this gangster flick. It undermines Knight's efforts to more tensely coil his plot strands together towards the denouement.

Invention comes from Cronenberg's own idiosyncratic perspective. With brotherhood members sporting emblematic tattoos of their lives, his body horror theme again subtly emerges, an exploration of physicality and psychological identity, submission and empowerment, belonging and exclusion. Mortensen carries his collection of body art well, especially in a prolonged, naked and bravura fight scene. The violence also fits Cronenberg's modus operandi. Graphic, brutal and visceral, it's a taut and potent sequence when unleashed, although this does highlight the less persuasive currents of Knight's script. The director is careful to avoid cinematic Routemaster cliches of London and his East End gansterdom is a refreshing world away from the Guy Ritchie's mockney formula. He still sets up highly stylised shots, though, that lift the story away from the disturbing contemporary reality it draws upon.

This is committed, often alluring filmmaking from Cronenberg, but being only sporadically compelling Eastern Promises doesn't quite live up to the expectations he merits.