Movie Review - Eastern Promises

Again, this is my review from seeing it at the theater - on opening night.

First off, based on the very graphic violence, the rape scenes (both what is shown, and what is only talked about) and the male frontal nudity in this movie, I am extremely surprised that it wasn't rated X or at the very least NC-17. (The nudity part, alone, I thought was an immediate X right there...?)

This was a V-E-R-Y long movie that could have easily chopped out 30 minutes and it still would have been just as good.

So you have a young pregnant girl who wanders into a pharmacy asking for help, blood poors out of her, she faints, she's rushed to the hospital and has an emergency C-section where the baby lives but she dies and then you find out that she has this diary describing very bad things that have happened involving very bad people. The diary is written in Russian, so the nurse who confiscates the diary (in order to give to someday give to the daughter) asks her uncle to translate it and in the meantime she follows clues from the girl's purse which lead her to the first of many seemingly shady characters. The man offers to translate the diary for her, so she brings him a copy of it and then once aware of the diary entries inside, he will do anything to get ahold of the original to keep his family's secrets safe.

The best part about this movie was trying to figure out who was a good guy and who was a bad guy because you're guessing from the first 5 minutes all the way until the very last 5 minutes.

There are quite a few disturbing torture-type violence scenes, so this movie is not for the squeamish. And of course the F bombs fly freely, but as long as you go into it knowing all of this, I think you will find it to be a very gripping, very intense, well-acted drama with a good story.

Vixy :]