PMDN Review: A History of Violence

May 24th, 2007 by Jaybrams

The wife and I have designated Wed night as our “Poor Man’s Date Night.” Basically it’s a night just for us, after the kids go to bed… no working out, no church duties, no practicing guitar, and probably no 360 (dang). This is night we generally use to watch one of our Blockbuster Online movies. We do the cheapy plan: One out at a time. This week:

A History of Violence (2005)
One of the very few pitfalls of online rental is the occasional memory lapse that your Q needs to be updated. We don’t get to see a lot in the theaters, so we should be updating it on a regular basis, but we don’t. Every now-and-again we’ll spend a good hour just rummaging through the available titles looking for possible gems we might have missed based on actors / directors we generally like… movies that got little play in theaters and were undermarketed. This is how we came across A History of Violence, starring Viggo Mortenson and Ed Harris… We like Viggo, my wife throws this on the Q months ago, suddenly it’s at our door due to lack of Q updating.

Anytime you start a review by stating “This is a 90 minute movie that seemed to last about 180″ you know something is wrong, but that is exactly what this felt like. Sometimes a slow movie can still hold your interest, and this one did for about 20 minutes… or maybe it was 40… i’m not sure, it’s hard to convert actual minutes into “History” minutes.

After the initial set up, the plot twists are not really twists… more like straight dead end roads that are so predictably insipid my 1st grader could’ve seen them coming a mile away. About the only shocking moments in this movie is the sudden aggressive and violent sex scene that really doesn’t even fit… (hindsight suggest this isn’t too surprising as the director has at least one NC-17 movie on his resume along with a bunch of other ridiculously stupid movies).

From a cultural and spiritual perspective, there is very little redeeming quality at all, only a glimpse of a daughter’s (roughly age 8) unconditional love and acceptance for her father when his spouse and older son have distanced themselves. Even still, you get the impression that it is less love and more naivety that drives the acceptance.

Bottom Line: Ignore the 7.5 out of 10 given on IMDB. This is a 3 / 10 at best.

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