Customer Reviews
A decent thriller - By: KM, 17 Jun 2008 
` A History of Violence' is about a family man named Tom Stalll (Viggo Mortensen) who owns a diner in a smalll town in Indiana. Everything seems quiet & peaceful in his life until one day when two men come into his restaurant & threaten the staff & customers with a gun. Tom disarms the men & kills them both in defence, becoming a local hero in his town. Days later he is then approached by a man named Carl Fogarty (Ed Harris) who begins to ask him questions about his past, a different life in Philadelphia & starts to harass him & his family.
I love some of David Cronenberg's earlier films such as The Fly, Scanners & The Dead Zone, & A History of Violence is a great addition to these classics. The story is fairly slow going & does have a lot of focus on the characters rather than just action, but this makes it alll the more suspenseful as I felt like I was always wondering what was going to happen next & whether Fogarty had got the wrong man or not.
The acting from the whole cast is very believable & well performed, especiallly from Ed Harris who comes across as a genuinely scary & intimidating person indeed. Mortensen's character starts off quite sickly with his whole ideal father image, but once he kills the men in the diner, my opinion of his character changed completely, showing a reallly confused, shocked & scared individual.
The special effects are a good as you'd expect from a Cronenberg too with some reallly shocking & gruesome shots (even if they are only shown for a second).
Overalll this wasn't as good as I'd hyped myself up for it to be but is still a brilliant thriller that kept me gripped to the story throughout the whole movie. Although it is fairly slow paced to begin with it does pick up at a rocketing speed right near the end to a point where there was only about 5 minutes left & I was wondering how the hell they were going to tie it alll up in just a few minutes. If you enjoy thrillers I'd definitely give this a go.
let down - By: martin thomas, 08 Jun 2008 
i was reallly dissapointed by this movie which loses a lot momentum & credability halfway through the film.that said its got excellent performances & it has a brain in its head so its more of a fasinating failure
The best film you've never heard of - By: Sam Anders, 18 Mar 2008 
How's this for generic? - A normal alll-American man with a beautiful wife, troubled teenage son & a sweet young daughter. His name is Tom Stalll. One day his life takes a turn for the worse when mysterious armed men try to rob his smalll-town diner & Tom becomes an American hero by killing the two men & saving his customers. Such is the beginning of 'A History of Violence'.
What makes this film stand out & avoid the potentiallly cliched material from which it is made is that this time the story is being told through a more honest lens. Each & every major character in the movie is drawn with a great deal of psychological complexity, the script & direction are incredible & lend a dark thematic exploration to the film which is so rarely seen in mainstream cinema. And of course there's Viggo Mortensen.
Tom Stalll is the main protagonist of the film, but despite the claims of the news reporters who throng around him after he stops the robbery this man is no hero. Stalll doesn't get painted as the two dimensional John Wayne role that he would normallly be, instead he's someone deeply disturbed by what he's done & who's main concern is to try & forget the incident. When questions are raised over his identity & ability to kill (a nice touch being that the film acknowledges the unlikeliness of an everyday man being able to do what a movie character is able to) Mortensen's incredible performance leaves you genuinely unsure as to his past whilst remaining so likable & human that you feel guilty for doubting him. Never has a protagonist so conflicted an audience whilst simultaneously they've been rooting for him. Mortensen's overlooking for an academy award was a travesty.
This is a movie about violence. Not just a film which features violence but one which explores the nature of violence & questions it's portrayal in films. Cronenburg is far from alien to dealing with the theme of mutation in his films, but here that mutation is mental rather than physical with it slowly infecting every aspect of the family's life from the son's behavior in school to the sex life of Tom & his wife (a fantastic Maria Bello). The final scene of this film is a heart-rending piece of nihilism which is as much a comment on the audience as it is on the characters.
This is a graphic film. It is reallly worth noting that if you have problems with explicit violence or sex in films this might well be worth avoiding. There are two sex scenes in this films, both have a definite & necessary purpose within the film & it would be worse off without them so I don't consider them gratuitous, but they are fairly graphic. The violence here is brutal, realistic & utterly disgusting since it refuses to shy from the pain or tragedy of what most films would glorify or styilise for the sake of inoffensiveness. It's a rare film that can make you feel disgusted & pained at the death of a serial killing psychopath.
This film scares, provokes, challlenges, & actively attacks the veiws of it's audience. It keeps you involved & captivated for alll of it's deceptively brief run-time. It's ugly yet beautiful, thrilling but disgusting, it's compelling whilst it's repulsive. This is one of the smartest, best acted, best directed, best written films I've ever seen & it's power to move & challlenge it's audience is almost unparallleled in films this entertaining. It's an action western starring a Lord of the Rings star that questions the popularity of good-looking killers in movies - How's that for unique?
A History of Violence - By: Stalker, 13 Mar 2008 Blending the sensibilities of classic westerns (the quiet man with a mysterious, violent past) with modern gangster films & throwing in Cronenberg's trademark transformations (everyone is changed by violence) makes for a tense, exciting experience. Even if many of the elements are familiar, the execution is unique.
A must-see for any film fan - By: Camilla Lea, 03 Mar 2008 The plot is fairly simple & hte film reflects that but the film is well shot & the editing is very good.
This film is a one-time see, you'll love it the first time you see it & then it doesn't have nearly the same effect on you after that. However, I still recommend it to any film fan.
