Eastern Promises

My wife wanted to see this movie because she'd heard that Viggo Mortensen was nude for part of it.  He is, but it's during a fight in a sauna and there's nothing even remotely erotic about it.

Eastern Promises starts off with a gruesome scene, a graphic depiction of a man getting his throat cut. The next scene is a woman stumbling into a pharmacy, bleeding heavily before passing out on the floor.  How these two events are related is part of the story, but only one part.

It's a look into the world of the Vory V Zakone--sometimes known as the Vor or the Russian Mafia--through the rise of Nikolai Luzhin (Viggo Mortensen), a driver for Semyon, the head of the Vor in London.  Nikolai has become close friends with Kirill, the enforcer and son for Semyon and his movement upwards is assured.  Things change when he meets Anna, a midwife who is trying to track down the family of a girl who died in childbirth.  All that Anna has is a diary, but the diary is in Russian and she needs someone to translate it. 

It's through Anna that we are drawn into this world of the Vor, and we see things through her eyes.  Semyon seems like a kindly old grandfather, until he delivers his veiled threats with a quiet menace.  Nikolai is a mysterous and clearly dangerous man.  Kirill is a drunken sociopath who fears no one other than his father.  Anna knows nothing of the Vor, and so she doesn't understand the danger she's in until it's too late.

Eastern Promises is very well done.  For the first 15 minutes you wonder what in the hell is happening, then the threads come together and the plot moves along, taking plenty of twists and turns.  There is a lot of graphic violence, but it's not gratuitous.  The violence is necessary to advance the plot.

~Easy says:  Check it out!
 

Eastern Promises trailer

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