A History of Violence (2005) Movie Review, Trailer, Film Still and Poster

USA, Germany 2005
Director: David Cronenberg
Cast: Viggo Mortensen, Maria Bello, Ed Harris, William Hurt, Ashton Holmes, Peter MacNeill
Rating: R
Release Date: 23 September 2005
Running Time: 1 hour 36 minutes

The Movie Review

A History of Violence film still 1


A HISTORY Of VIOLENCE
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A History of Violence, bearing an intriguing name, is a strong and serious hybrid of action and crime film that can be said overlooked by some fans of the genre.

Tom Stall lives with his wife Edie (Maria Bello) and his children in a quite small town of Millbrook, Indiana. A town where all its residents know each other and greet each other warmly every morning. The serenity of Millbrook however will soon be disturbed by the presence of two mobsters in Tom Stall's cafeteria. They pick up a fight and when one of them tries to rape Tom's staff, Tom is forced to kill them. Afterwards Tom is the Hero and even people outside Millbrook now admire him. This situation leads to some people coming into Millbrook and claiming to have known Tom as Joey Cussack. Denying their claim and bewildered, Tom and his family are now have to face bigger threat that's surrounded with even bigger puzzlement.

AHOV spends the first twenty minutes with several small scenes that are meaningful. They function as warming up sessions for the real action that is about to rush in. That's brilliant, we are warmed up by a small portion of drama, action, comedy and even romantic scenes. That combination is enough to let us get to know the characters better. The more minutes pass the more it gets engaging. The musical scores that have some classical notes on them are a notable help to fine tune the audience's tension. This movie is also great in its dialogue, the lines sounds very natural as is the way people communicate in everyday’s life, in a sense the film is not trying hard to make the story realistic, it is realistic in itself. Something that the director was not famous for, this is different with the director's previous works that spent more time in imagination and hallucination such as Naked Lunch (1991) or the notorious Shivers (1975).

AHOV is really naturally intriguing and exciting. It pays attention to little details that are usually missed by other action movies, like the scene where Edie throw her shoes at the fitting hall to get her daughter, and the fight scene between Tom's son and his friend the bully.

It's a shame though when things got better, the script orders Edie to blabber like in some kind of soap opera. I guess recently I just fed up with the scenes involving thoughtless partner in marriage. Isn't there any single wife who willing to support her husband no matter what? Especially considering Tom is not a bad guy after all? Viggo Mortensen is good and well.. he's supposed to be good, however I notice a distinctive acting coming from William Hurt, I guess he should have been given more minutes in the running length of AHOV.

In a nutshell, A History of Violence is a resemblance of the 70s movies and it has a good combination of Action and Drama, further added by other elements, this movie is a good action crime movie.

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