Cronenberg’s noble failure shows importance of a strong story. 

David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises is clearly intended to be a Russo-British version of Sergio Leone’s celebrated 1984 gangland drama Once Upon a Time in America.

It is successful at that: like Leone’s overrated would-be crime epic, Eastern Promises is overlong, pretentious, and boring.

There is much to be admired in the film, to be sure. The actors and actresses turn in excellent performances, and the setting—Russian gangs in London—is an interesting one. Plus, director Cronenberg is appropriately interested in his characters’ motivations and evaluations of the situations at hand.

His failure, as with Leone’s film, is mainly on the level of story and pacing.

The director spends far too much time dwelling on characters’ faces or posture in an attempt to communicate the depth of their feelings and the seriousness of the situation. This is entirely unnecessary. We already know what a person feels when an infant is in peril of its life, or when they realize that someone means them harm. There’s no need to establish that, and the director would do much better to spend that time establishing some additional point.

The plot has a reasonably workable main story line, though there is nothing at all original about it. What the film most sorely lacks is some good subplots; what little there is of them is handled perfunctorialy.

That keeps the size of the cast down—and hence the expense, which is a good thing—but Cronenberg and writer Stephen Knight fail to create sufficiently interesting additional conflicts among them, beyond the central ones. The subplots, like the main story, are largely cliched: the man who is in fact evil behind his facade of bourgeois respectability, the gang boss’s hedonistic son who may not be strong enough to take over upon the father’s imminent retirement, the amitious driver who wants to be a real gangster, the humble working woman whose effort to do a good deed plunges her into an exceedingly dangerous situation, etc.

There are two attempts at incorporating major plot twists, but alas each is thoroughly predictable long before it happens.

Interestingly, the MSNBC reviewer dislikes the second twist for being so abrupt as to take viewers out of the film, destroying the all-important suspension of disbelief. He must not have been paying much attention during the previous 90 minutes, as any reasonably perceptive person would have seen this plot twist coming a good hour earlier. But, alas, so people never know, as Paul McCartney once wrote.

Cronenberg’s film at least avoids the Marxist silliness of Once Upon a Time in America, and is 129 minutes shorter, both of which make it a better experience than its model. But it could have been so much more enjoyable and enlightening if the director and writer had been less interested in character and more interested in story.

As F. Scott Fitzgerald observed in his personal notebook, ACTION IS CHARACTER. Without a strong story, there is nothing interesting or enlightening for the characters to do. And without that, there are neither fully formed characters nor any real insights. That is the real problem with Eastern Promises.