All the kids come running for the great taste of possession.

Next Stop: Unoriginality Central.

Six Millennial friends try to contact unseen entities supposedly haunting an old house where murders were committed. Where have we heard this before? Oh, everywhere… There are a couple of interesting tidbits thrown into this mix of horror and detective thriller, but for the most part, DEMONIC has a devil of a time coming up with anything original.

Dustin Milligan is John, whose mother was murdered in that house. He’s the skeptic, urged on the trip by his pregnant girlfriend Michelle (Cody Horn). Milligan first came to my notice when he appeared as the young gigolo on Mike Judge’s EXTRACT; his face has matured and he’s now at the resemblance crossroads – either he’ll grow up to be Superman, or Nicolas Cage. (Then again, Nicolas Cage was almost Superman, so, uh-oh…) And Horn came to all men’s notice when she appeared almost naked in Channing Tatum’s roman a clef MAGIC MIKE.

Aaron Yoo sets up cameras and sensors in the house; he’s the computer guy because – Asian. Scott Mechlowicz is Bryan, leading the expedition, and Megan Park is Jules the blond fluff. There is another guy brought along for the same reason STAR TREK officers beam down to planets with nameless janitors.

Frank Grillo (CAPTAIN AMERICA: WINTER SOLDIER) opens the movie as a detective investigating a mass murder at this selfsame house. The victims are all those kids. John is found barely alive, put in handcuffs and asked to recount what transpired to a psychologist, played by Maria Bello (PRISONERS) – the most casting cred this movie can pull. Story now flits between the present murder scene and flashbacks of the kids in the house…

The kids prepare for their “evocation” – is that the Millennial word for it? Not kewl enough to call it a “séance” anymore? – while all manner of disturbance plays out around them, mostly that old trope of seeing horribly disfigured entities peripherally, and being grabbed by unseen things in arbitrary jumpscares, which are all starting to sound and look exactly the same in every “horror” movie. And why does the jumpscare entity have to be horribly disfigured anyway?

As John’s story unfolds, we find out there was a demon in the house, kept prisoner by a rune scratched into the floorboards, and it needed a warm body to possess so that it could escape its bonds. If that’s your storyline, writers, then stick to it. Now the demon has seemingly possessed Michelle’s unborn baby, yet it has taken another form and is whining that it can’t find Michelle amongst all the murdered kids to ensure that she has survived and therefore that IT has survived in her womb… But wait: what are you doing outside her womb in another form anyway? Isn’t this demonstrably a form of escape from the house? So you can be in two places at once, and outside the house, and you’re still looking for a baby in a womb because you’re supposed to be in there awaiting your escape into the outside world? And if you’re in there possessing that fetus, wouldn’t you already know it? – I mean, you’re a demon! – or do you revert back to the cognizance of a fetus?

And thus, like a tree rotting from its roots and falling on a shiny car, DEMONIC fails in its basic plotline, which informs everything else in the story. The slight interest that was piqued by serving up the story in non-chronological order is pointless. Story is ruined by its own illogical writing.

Dustin Milligan is well on his way to becoming Nicolas Cage.

END

Kevin James takes a photo of Salma Hayek’s ass, the only ass onscreen worth taking a photo of.

Would you like a little movie to go with your pee jokes?

Rob Schneider isn’t here. Nonetheless, GROWN UPS 2 is still worse than its predecessor. It starts with a pee joke, then a tit joke, then a shit joke, then another pee joke, then a combination burp-sneeze-fart trifecta douchefecta. You couldn’t make a movie this bad if you were trying to make a movie this bad. So we congratulate long-time Adam Sandler director Dennis Dugan for achieving the impossible.

The four friends from the last movie (played by Sandler, Chris Rock, Kevin James and David Spade) have inexplicably decided to all reside in the same small town they grew up in, after having left it to pursue their careers. In the last movie, they all rendezvoused here to pay homage to their dead high school coach; now, there’s zero reason why they are living here pursuing lives as layabouts and wieners, as they meander through a script (by Fred Wolf, Sandler and Tim Herlihy) as unrealistic as it is unfunny. About one hour into GROWN UPS 2, we give up all hope this dog-queef of a movie will come anywhere near a story, and go do something more productive, like rubbing the lotion on its skin or it gets the hose again.

Disjointed scenes of family life, social life, the kids of the principals interacting, Salma Hayek’s tits, rolling David Spade down the road in a tractor tire (yeah, that’s a bit), Colin Quinn simulating taking an ice cream shit, Taylor Lautner as an ambiguously-homo fraternity jock, Salma Hayek’s tits, Alexander Ludwig as Spade’s punk kid, Maya Rudolph playing Rock’s ugly wife again (no wait! People tell me she’s “beautiful.” If you say so), college chicks in bikinis, Salma Hayek’s tits, Shaq as a dopey cop, Nick Swardson ably filling Schneider’s shoes as resident douchebag, and Sandler hiring every single person he knows on the planet for an amateurish cameo.

There is a scene of unbelievable ignorance, which sums up how this movie reached its audience: Maria Bello and Kevin James show their small son math flashcards, like 8+6, to which the son answers “38” or some such idiocy. They PRAISE him. On it goes with the flashcards, every answer wrong from this idiot child, yet receiving PRAISE not correction, because they “don’t want to destroy his confidence.” Audience, you do realize that kid is YOU? Never learning the difference between quality and stupidity, the stage set to grow up an Adam Sandler fan; a Venn diagram overlapping Republicans as far away from facts as possible.

Sandler himself plays a normal guy, and I am thankful for this small mercy, as I quite like his Everyman demeanor, but Kevin James quickly cancels that out with his fat-based tryhard pratfalls.

As with the last movie, there is ONE SINGLE MOMENT that achieves any kind of empathy or resonance with normal human beings. Sandler reaches a last straw seeing his son bullied, so in order to show him that a bully needs to be stood up to, he takes on his own bully from ages past – Steve Austin. As they face off, Austin, who “has a son in Afghanistan” realizes “we’d do anything for our sons,” and whispers to Sandler that he would take a dive. It is so touching, I swear I almost cried.

Then Kevin James does something fucking stupid.

END

Groan Ups.

This movie should be spanked on its botty and sent to bed with no supper.

Written by Adam Sandler and longtime collaborator Fred Wolf, directed by longtime Sandler director, Dennis Dugan, GROWN UPS stars Sandler, Chris Rock, Kevin James, David Spade and tiresome tool Rob Schneider. Now I ask you: with the wealth of filmmaking experience in the room, why is this movie about as smart as a 12-year-old boy?

Five friends reunite for the funeral of their school coach and spend the weekend trying to be funny; between the ad-libs and the unfunny script, nostalgia is a bitch.

GROWN UPS has but one “moment” – that magical point in even some of the worst films where story, acting and emotion all comes together and bites us on the humanity bone: before taking a winning shot in the climactic basketball game, Lenny (Sandler) takes a look at his childhood rival, Dickie (Colin Quinn) and at Dickie’s trailer trash wife; in a slow motion moment, Lenny sees how desperately Dickie wants to win this meaningless game and assesses in that split-second how Dickie’s life might have turned out differently had he won a pivotal game against Lenny as a child. It’s a touching moment, as Lenny realizes how Dickie’s life was stuck on the low road, while Lenny went on to a successful career and a hot wife (Salma Hayek). Lenny decides to throw the game, to let Dickie “feel what it was like to win for a change.”

This moment would have read more emotionally had the movie been made by someone who understood movie structure. The miniscule foreshadowing of this moment was shunted aside by pee jokes, tit jokes, boring family activities and Kevin James substituting fatman-dancing for comedy.

Maria Bello plays Kevin James’s wife and is the absolute hottest thing on four decades. Even though 20-year-olds try to monopolize the perve angles (especially plastic blond Madison Riley), pretending to show off their bodies like they enjoy sex or something, you know that Bello is the Real Deal who would never object to a postman ringing twice with a manly back door delivery.

On that same tack, my, but that Maya Rudolph is one ugly woman! She plays Chris Rock’s wife, and she may be a wonderful person, a talented comedienne and more financially successful than I am, but GOD DYAM if she doesn’t have a face to sink an oil tanker. I’m just putting it out there, for all those people who are thinking it but too pc to say it. And she’s pregnant! Who was the half-blind guy who tripped over in the dark and accidentally spat DNA into that swamp thing? Eurph!

The only gag in GROWN UPS that actually works is the scene where the five friends watch Madison Riley bend over her car engine in short shorts, all agreeing that they shouldn’t be staring together, but taking shifts: the tree, the house, the lake, her ass – until they all end up staring at the tree together, no one on ass duty.

Then again – considering how many of them make rumps of themselves, they’re ALL on ass duty.

END

A Date With Density.

The pitch: Two men get trapped in a mine shaft. Nothing happens. Then they get rescued. The end. The suits harrumph: where’s the drama? The screenwriter and her agent scramble: well, we flash back to generic good times with families and watch the trapped guys banally discuss heroism and loyalty and STARSKY AND HUTCH.

Imagine you’re really really short.

The suits aren’t buying it. The screenwriter and her agent squirm. Seen it a thousand times in movies and LASSIE episodes and probably on GILLIGAN’S ISLAND.

The screenwriter lightbulbs. Change “mine shaft” to “World Trade Center.” Suddenly: funding. And now, not only can they append the wholly untrue “Based on a True Story” with impunity, they can also afford Oliver Stone and Nicolas Cage and Maggie Gyllenhaal and Maria Bello…

But it’s still just “two guys trapped in a mine shaft.”

Oliver Stone‘s WORLD TRADE CENTER is not about the World Trade Center. Nor does it posit stances or pose questions on conspiracies, religionism, racism, political ideologies, oil collusion or White House incompetence. Which raises the obvious question: why then make a movie about the World Trade Center at all?

To invoke a known audience. “World Trade Center” has become synonymous with “9-11” (itself a contraction of a culture-shocking event) and both have become shorthand for identifying the modern version of the Common Enemy and proselytizing on courage and heroism and misplaced patriotism. Attaching that moniker to any media – however tangentially – sells tickets.

Now imagine you’re seeing a big ice cream cone.

WORLD TRADE CENTER is about two beat cops, John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) and Will Jimeno (Michael Peña) who are trapped in the rubble of Tower 1’s collapse before they even get the chance to rescue one civilian. (Guess we’ve added yet another criterion to the term “heroism”: anyone who intends to rescue people but needs to be rescued himself after doing nothing.)

The first act is restrained film-making at its best, as Stone shows us Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawning like any other mundane workday, New York populace going through the motions of city life. Comparisons with the unobtrusive camera of Paul Greengrass’s superior UNITED 93 are unavoidable, and – like that movie – a vicarious thrill builds in our bones, for we know something that the New Yorkers don’t: that today is going to be so far removed from mundane it will gouge out its own vernacular in history.

The first intimation that there is something horribly awry with this particular September 11th is an ominous plane-shaped shadow whooshing over the cityscape…

Stone does not explicitly show airplanes impacting Towers (it would remove focus from his characters), but his scenes of destruction and mayhem are as good as cinema gets. And though there are still whiners puling “too soon,” the audience yet extracts a rubbernecker’s glee from watching this unimaginable tragedy unfold with astoundingly seamless special effects from a Ground Zero ringside seat.

Now imagine you’re Superman.

Stone has also captured excellent performances with the shock, surprise, horror and incredulity of the officers arriving at Ground Zero. Those of us who were not there could never hope to imagine what uncontainable emotions overwhelmed each First Responder’s breast as he gazed up at a tableau which the wildest imagination could never conjure.

And after injecting us into the heart of the action, with a breath-stopping sequence trapping our stars under mountains of rubble, the film – like the World Trade Center – collapses. For there is nowhere to go – literally and figuratively – and it becomes obvious that inexperienced screenwriter Andrea Berloff has formulaically set up a tearjerker just waiting to happen.

There’s a fine line between restrained and boring. And Stone’s hand seems so stultified by the gutless executives who funded this project that he resignedly points his camera over the wrong side of that line. Though he tries to retain relevance to the 9-11 Götterdämmerung (by inserting actual newsreel footage of slimy Mayor Giuliani, faux-President Bush, reports on United Flight 93, the Pentagon crash, et al), even the earth-shuddering impact of the WTC Towers collapsing is soon forgotten when the story turns its focus on the wives of the trappees (Maggie Gyllenhaal and Maria Bello) and their maudlin, Academy-tilted performances. It turns into just “two guys trapped in a mine shaft.”

The movie also loses what little objectivity it strived for when Jimeno launches into an extended “heroism” speech (which veritably bends over and spreads its cheeks for the hero mongers). Meanwhile, Cage’s initial heartfelt performance of McLoughlin diminishes over time, as he uses up the film’s one allocated swear word (as decreed by the MPAA for PG-13 films) early in his desperation and then becomes non-believable, as no one in this mind-breaking situation ever swears after that one transgression, making it all as painfully PG-13 as any Freddie Prinze Junior debacle.

“What? No conspiracy?”

And while Jimeno has dumb Jesus dreams, McLoughlin inertly flashes back to his four kids with the hands-down hottest MILF in the neighborhood (Bello). The flashbacks are smartly executed: one partner is shown beginning the flashback and as the syrup reaches danger levels, the other partner is shown at the tail end of the flashback, making it seem like both partners were flashing back on the same LEAVE IT TO BEAVER moment. (If any of our lives were half as idyllic as the “real life” characters portrayed in any 9-11 movie, the Muslims who razed the Towers would have defected over to white-bread Christianity millennia ago. Or maybe that’s why they razed them.)

Nothing continues to happen, proving conclusively that not every true story is worth telling.

The rescue of the two men contains its fair share of nail-biting and was apparently instigated by an ex-Marine, Dave Karnes (Michael Shannon), who abandoned his job in Connecticut and traveled to Ground Zero because “God called him.” (While talking to Karnes, God must have neglected to head on over to Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Florida and talk to Bush about the attacks. Without a direct word from God, how could anyone be expected to abandon the compelling Pet Goat to lead a country? Evidently, only after the attacks does God deign to start talking with W.) As we learn of Karnes’s delusional nature (obsessing over Marine ethos to the point of asking to be addressed as “Staff Sergeant”), we realize this is the exact type of bulldog fundamentalist bred by the American Armed Forces, and that it wasn’t God calling him after all – it was his red neck.

Staunch performances by the supporting cast (Stephen Dorff, Frank Whaley, Brad William Henke) add little to the pat formula.

To its credit, the story does not make it seem like rescuing its two stars puts an end to the horror, and the unfinished nature of the rescues and aftermath are noted; Jimeno’s family walk past a wall posted with hundreds of Missing Person flyers, Karnes emerges from the rescue rubble talking of retribution, Dorff’s policeman laments the multitude not accounted for, and McLoughlin himself had to undergo 2 years of medically-induced comas and 27 surgeries – well, that’ll happen when a World Trade Center falls on you. Or maybe he just wanted to look like John Travolta again.

Only 20 people were pulled out of the WTC rubble alive. Only eighteen more True Stories with movie deals to go…

END

Black Lung Satire.

Aaron Eckhart has always deserved to play a role as ferociously incisive as this. THANK YOU FOR SMOKING fleshes his latent silver-tongued devil in the form of Nick Naylor, a spokesman for Big Tobacco; the type of guy who could sell ice to Eskimos in winter.

Cucumberlung

Movie opens with Nick on one of those daytime talk shows responsible for the redneckification of America, guesting alongside lobbyists against the tobacco industry and – purely as emotive stab against tobacco – Cancer Boy. (As hilariously direct as this epithet is – correct me if I’m wrong – wasn’t Cancer Boy, as a proper noun, invented by The Kids in the Hall?) Using his gifted gab, Nick skillfully turns the audience aggression aimed at Big Tobacco against the anti-smoking lobbyists, using the head-shaved, irradiated Cancer Boy as prime example of Tobacco’s good intent, “Though these lobbyists would like to see Cancer Boy die to prove their point, it is in Tobacco’s best interests that he LIVES, to continue using our product.”

Later, giving a speech at his son’s school, he tears a new hole for a ten-year-old girl when she offers her mother’s opinion that smoking is unhealthy, “Oh, is your mommy a doctor?”

From Christopher Buckley’s novel, directing and writing his first feature film, Jason Reitman (son of Ghostbuster Ivan) creates a character we rarely see in Hollywood movies: a hero quite aware of, and at peace with, his moral flexibility.

Zealously embracing his job as Sultan of Spin, Nick is a mixture of forest fire (machine-gunning his dialog in short, sharp bursts, savagely taking down all comers), and innocence (Eckhart retaining that disarming demeanor he displayed in YOUR FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS, 1998). We “don’t see him coming” – unlike the Cruise of MAGNOLIA or the Martin of LEAP OF FAITH – slamming home runs with every fallacious, roundabout rebuttal.

Robert Duvall is the industry’s Puff Daddy – some mighty level of Big Tobacco CEO; William H. Macy now officially owns the character he plays here – Senator Ortolan Finistirre, yet another perplexed dexter, trying not to stumble under the pressure of Nick’s smooth operator; Sam Elliott could not be better cast as an ex-Marlboro Man (we cannot even imagine sullying his deep-voiced masculinity with BROKEBACK sniggers), and J.K. Simmons has been honing this gruff boss routine since SPIDER-MAN.

The unconvincing Katie Holmes plays a reporter who sexually squeezes incriminating info from Nick, precipitating the loss of his job. Her vapid acting skills bear out the theory that she should still be plying her trade in teen romantic comedies. Or amateur porn.

Nick’s lunchtime buddies, lobbyists for alcohol (Maria Bello) and guns (David Koechner), who take a perverse pleasure in terming themselves the MOD Squad (“Merchants Of Death”), bond over wicked lobbying anecdotes and their respective industry’s death tolls. Bello would have indisputably made a more ravishing and convincing underhanded reporter than Holmes. (I’m not advocating they swap roles. I’m advocating that Holmes should find employment more suited to her unique talents – maybe a toilet cleaner at Wal-Mart.)

The thin plot finds Nick commissioning a super-agent (Rob Lowe, a biting composite of Hollywood Cliché, from his smarmy assistant to his kimono) to get cigarettes back into the lips of A-List stars in A-List movies – like smoking’s glory days with Bogey and Bacall; when men were men and women were not she-males.

This simple story only exists to give Nick something to do while the movie studies his incorrigible character. His suave amorality is tempered when dealing with son Joey (Cameron Bright). To be a good part-time father, Nick must use his rationalization skills to educate Joey about a world unable to see its own contradictions.

To prime Joey for a school debate, Nick espouses: “If you argue correctly, you’re never wrong” – which, being true, is an indictment not just against lobbyists (on any side) and their unholy string-pulling in congress, but also against the current legal system, the entertainment industry and any forum where the slickest LIE will triumph over a mundane Truth.

Deeper than the father-son relationship, the movie’s ultimate purpose:  a quick-witted satire on how Spin has crept into every aspect of our modern lives. Smoking lobbyists are the subject here but their deceitful nature has only been nurtured by society itself: fat chicks call themselves “thick”; we tell prospective buyers that our car with the massive oil leak “runs well”; 19 months into a stalemated war, a Mission Accomplished sign flies high at a Presidential address; and a drug which causes irregular heartbeat, dizziness, high blood pressure, nausea, diarrhea, impotence, dry mouth, headaches and blurred vision is marketed as an “Anti-Depressant”… to make you more sociable! (Either way you end up staying home – from imagined anxiety, or real anxiety that you may crap your pants and have a heart attack while trying to get it up. More dangerous than heroin, they call it Zoloft.)

In a plot development which would have sent most screenwriters squealing for their generic PG-13 character arcs, Nick is kidnapped by anti-smoking fanatics, forced to overdose on nicotine patches and, in a tableau reminiscent of Michelangelo’s Pietà, left to die in the lap of Daniel French’s Lincoln statue. The imagery is portentous because Nick effects a resurrection of sorts: his tolerance to nicotine, through smoking, kept him alive – and is woven into the fabric of his spin thereafter: “Smoking saved my life!”

In a refreshing denouement, Nick experiences no epiphanies on morality or political correctness. When he wins a showdown with Senator Finisterre, he refuses an offer of his old job back – not because he has recanted on his stance, but because he refuses to sell his exemplary services back to the company that fired him. Movie ends with Nick continuing as a devilish apologist for maligned causes, taking his talents and amorality elsewhere.

THANK YOU FOR SMOKING is a biting rejoinder to all things politically correct. It reminds us to educate ourselves in the face of staggering obstacles. And it illustrates that the obstacles to truth are sometimes the very people exhorting you to seek it.

Someone had the audacity to label their anti-smoking campaign “truth” and no one questioned this lie. I am not even a smoker, yet I find those insufferable neo-hippies an insult and abomination to humanity; themselves, spin doctors of the highest order. Everyone knows smoking is harmful to your health – even Nick Naylor admits this – so placing ever more warnings in the public eye is simply “busywork”; given the choice, those who choose to smoke – will smoke. As those who choose to pig on chocolate, McDonalds or Zoloft will do so no matter how many times their shit turns green.

If the movie is sending a message about Choice, isn’t it intriguing that no one is actually seen smoking in the movie? Even the mighty John Wayne (seen in a snippet from SANDS OF IWO JIMA, 1949) is shot down as he prepares to light up. Relating back to this film’s plot – getting an A-List Hero to smoke onscreen – was this non-smoking decision true irony on the film-makers’ part, or simply the MPAA enforcing their non-smoking edicts on this major release film, making it a victim of the very condition it rails against?

Put that in your pipe and smoke it!

END

Remember when you violently helped those hobbits at this place?

When the Evil Twin Piques.

Director David Cronenberg assails his audience with A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, surface “pulp thriller,” with an undercurrent of vigilantism, Darwinism and Plot Conveniences. A simplistic tale which careens against the cerebral precepts of Survival of the Fittest, Natural Selection and Freudian sublimation. (Any more big words, or are we done for the day?…)

Schizopoffy

Loosely screenplayed by Josh Olson, from the graphic novel of the same name (by John Wagner and Vince Locke), A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE is a psychological thriller centering around leisurely Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen), living the Life Idyllic in a town which elevates podunk to an art form. Running the town diner with the urgency of a napping camel, Tom is well-liked by his bumpkin employees and patrons, and long-married to wife Edie (steaming Maria Bello, so readily-sexed that every man in the audience immediately pegged her as a work of fiction – but we can dream, can’t we?).

During expository scenes establishing Tom’s still-lusty relationship with his spouse of 17 years, and his teen son’s status as the school’s bully-fodder (both sub-plots artfully invoking the word “pussy”), Cronenberg tweaks the Norman Rockwell ’til the syrup bleeds from the celluloid, setting up his audience in eerily-expectant treacle, to ensure that the subsequent dose of savagery will scythe like razor-wire…

Into Tom’s diner walks the criminal element from the disturbing opening sequence of the film – in a parallel universe, these two guys would be Lance Henriksen and Matthew McConaughey – who attempt to divest Tom of his languidly-earned cash at gunpoint. Big mistake! With the suaveness of a panther, Tom efficiently dispatches the two felons, illustrating he is somewhat less somnolent than his aw-shucks drawl implies.

Like George Lucas ignoring his actors for fear of clutter on his green-screen, at this point in the film, Cronenberg and his writers opt to ignore realities which would clutter his movie’s thematic sweeps, to wit, The Media and The Law. The Media, which is instrumental in alerting Tom’s presence to characters from his unsavory past, suddenly vanishes altogether once it serves its purpose of conjuring those characters into the storyline; indeed, the absence of an intrusive, ubiquitous press – which, in our reality, would descend rapaciously on a multiple murder story before the last body’s chalk outline is drawn – leaves us stranded in an insular universe of the film-maker’s creation, and we shift uneasily in our seats at this lack of plausibility.

Remember that violent family portrait?

Like an Armani-suited vulture, out of Tom’s past swoops the sinister Carl Fogarty (Ed Harris), all one-eyed and unnerving, and calling Tom “Joey from Philly” with the insistence of a jabbing finger to the chest, presaging Tom’s descent into his dark half.

Though the trailers tout this “mystery” aspect, we are ahead of the characters in identifying that Tom is indeed a re-wrought persona of professional killer “Joey,” and the movie is more a study in Tom reconciling his adopted pacifism with his innate violent streak. After sublimating it for almost two decades, it is his dormant Art of Killing which saves Tom’s life. Guess it’s like riding a bike.

After loosing his inner beast so publicly, Tom finds that his whipping-boy son has opened a can of whup-ass on his own bullies. Whether he does this due to his father’s latent “violent genes” or because his father set a decisive example, we are not to know (Nature vs. Nurture?), as a father-son confrontation leads only to a smack upside the head from Tom. When the son goes Outlaw Josey Wales in a later scene, the question looms larger, but it is not Cronenberg’s purview to answer his thematic questions, only to pose them. Matter of fact, he avoids wrestling his themes to the ground like the Stall family avoids open discussion on Tom’s sordid past, leaving us, once again, shifting uneasily.

In his outré universe (NAKED LUNCH, CRASH, EXISTENZ), Cronenberg is king – some may contend dauphin, to David Lynch – of suspenseful, disturbing vignettes, left-field sex, and unapologetic brutality that allows him loving close-ups of decimated faces and mutilated nose cavities; of these aspects, there are plenty in HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, as well as Tom’s underlying themes of alienation and betrayal (with his wife), hero-worship and anger (from his son) and self-doubt and intrinsic dependence (on his bad self – not SHAFT bad, but actually bad). Yet we cannot reconcile or forgive the haphazard conclusion tacked onto this otherwise engaging drama, starting its fall from grace at the point where the seemingly one-man Sheriff’s Department, Sam (Peter MacNeill, recently Detective Horvath of Showtime’s QUEER AS FOLK), exhibits embarrassment in questioning Tom – who was only at the quintuple-murder stage at that point! – which serves to highlight the absence of high-level judicial inquiries regarding Tom’s hurricane of violence; the Cronenberg “Ignoring Quotient” in overdrive.

By the time Tom faces his brother, Richie Cusack (a dangerously-smarmy William Hurt, doing his best Gary Oldman), the film degenerates into an Adam West BATMAN episode, in which the Villain, who has every opportunity to eradicate the Hero expeditiously, instead plots a prolonged and gruesome death for him, with a lot of Villain-talk – if only the darned Hero would cooperate and stop that infernal escaping! The last scenes seem to be a visceral payoff for the bloodthirsty contingent, and leave us with unanswered – and maybe unanswerable – questions regarding the future of Tom’s estranged family dynamic.

A history of violence? Isn’t this Viggo fella the same guy who spent the last four years raging postal at Helm’s Deep and Pelennor Fields, slaughtering thousands of face-challenged evil-kins alongside a dandy archer and fey wizard? You can run, but you can’t hide, Aragorn, Son of Arathorn!…

END