A History of Violence (2005)

This movie was a fairly random pick. A friend had pointed it out last weekend, and today when it came time to choose a film, this was popped back into my mind. Going on nothing other than the cover, I figured it was going to be a standard revenge movie, after all, that's the favorite type of movie of the friend that pointed it out. Really all I knew was that Viggo Mortensen and I really liked him in Lord of the Rings and Eastern Promises so I was interested to see what this movie was all about. If you're similarly interested, hit the jump break to see what I thought.


Tom Stall is just a regular guy in a small American town. The kind of town where everyone knows everyone. He has a family and a small diner where he makes a living to support them. In many ways, he's living the American Dream. Some ominous strangers role into town and before anyone can blink, what would have been a deadly tragedy ends up with Tom as the local hero and being plastered on every news channel. This in itself leads to even more deadly and dangerous repercussions. Can this simple man protect the life he's made for himself?

Hero for a day

So were do I begin with this? I guess the best place to start would be with the fact that this ended up being very sporadic. It had lot of down time with a few extremely short moments of extremely graphic violence. The moments are so short in fact, that I sort of doubt its classification as an action movie. One positive thing I can say is that the effects on the gunshots, blood-spray and the brief look at wounds you get are very well done. The scar Ed Harris sports in the film is very cool too.

Now I wish I could at least point to the cast and their acting and say how great they all were, but sadly that isn't the case here. It's true that many members of the cast do a decent job, but really the characters just didn't feel real to me. Everything, especially the emotional moments, just seemed forced and not earned. The child actors were particularly bad, which is disappointing after seeing so many films recently with good child actors. On the brighter side, the movie's villains were quite convincingly played by Ed Harris and William Hurt. Sadly, I didn't feel like Viggo's performance matched them. I can't place my finger on it, I just don't think there was very good character development for him. It felt like we were just supposed to believe he was this person from what people said, instead of proving it by showing us he was this great man. On the other hand, Ed Harris is all kinds of creepy and menacing.

"What a strange eye you have." "All the better to see you with, my dear."

In the end, I found myself left wanting. I wanted more of an actual story and more from these characters we're supposed to care about. Also, why was there a completely pointless and unneeded full body nude shot of Maria Bello in this? It only lasts for a split second, and doesn't seem to add anything from what I can tell. Man, I must be getting old if I don't appreciate some boobs in a movie. But really that just seemed to sum up everything this movie was about. Shallow split second glimpses of something with no real rhyme or reason to it. The movie runs really short too at only about 1h30min. It feels like they could have really expanded on the son's story, or Tom's struggle instead of the awkward turn the movie takes. But I guess when I look back on it, I'm kind of thankful that the movie wasn't any longer than it already was.