DVD Review: Eastern Promises

David Cronenberg has brought us many horrifying images over the years – from James Woods inserting pulsating video cassettes into his stomach to Jeff Goldblum transforming into a gloopy insect. But few are as disturbing as the sight of Viggo Mortensen's, er, bits flapping around during the much discussed bathhouse fight in Cronenberg's Eastern Promises, which hits DVD shelves this week.

This is the Canadian director's follow up to A History Of Violence, and like that film mixes a mainstream thriller plot with his own distinctive style. It's a film in which virtually no one acts with their own accent, with Naomi Watts as a London-based midwife who finds herself mixed up in all sorts of trouble with a bunch of dodgy Russian gangsters.

It's rare for Cronenberg to be more interested in gangsters and babies than exploding heads and deviant sex, and even rarer to watch a London-set film from a North American director without a single shot of Big Ben. But the director shows far more affinity with the capital than, say, Woody Allen's London-based excursions, perhaps due to the fact that the script comes from British screenwriter Stephen Knight.

But despite Eastern Promises' air of mainstream respectability, Cronenberg has little problem giving longtime fans the gory goods. The movie opens with a graphic throat-slitting, and the aforementioned confrontation between Viggo Mortensen and a pair of burly Russian thugs in a Finsbury sauna ranks as one of the most gruesomely over-the-top sequences in his filmography.

To be fair, this isn't always one of Cronenberg's strongest films. The script is surprisingly generic, with an utterly pointless twist in the final act, while a demented Vincent Cassel seems to be acting in a completely different movie to the rest of the cast.

However, what's good is very good indeed. Mortensen supplies his role as the enigmatic mob henchmen with considerable depth, while Armin Mueller-Stahl is quietly terrifying as the ageing gang patriarch. And if Knight's script does follow thriller convention a little too much, it nevertheless provides a fascinating insight into the world of the Russian mafia. If you're a Cronenberg fan, like me, you'll no doubt be 'Russian' out to buy it this weekend. Sorry...