Eastern Promises and The Bourne Ultimatum.

Continuing with our recent theme of praising understatement in television/cinema, Eastern Promises delivers a similarly un-Hollywood thriller filled with complex characters and a small number of pivotal plot twists, with plenty of ambiguity to keep the viewer thinking, although a slightly coincidence-driven denouement did detract somewhat from the brilliance of the preceding 80 minutes.

Eastern Promises stars Viggo Mortensen as Nikolai, the tough, stoic, possibly psychotic driver for a Russian organized crime family in London. A teenaged girl connected to that family ends up dying while giving birth in a hospital with midwife Anna (Naomi Watts), who is of Russian descent, attending. But what appears to be – and was marketed as – a straight-up thriller where Anna ends up chased by the mob because of what she knows about the dead girl turns instead into a series of interconnected threads around shifting loyalties within the crime family. Nikolai and Anna are well-drawn, complex characters, revealed in layers as the film goes on, as is Kirill, Nikolai’s boss and the son of the crime family’s patriarch. Even into the final scenes, we’re still learning about these characters.

Mortensen was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance, which was superb and utterly convincing, although I didn’t really see how any of us benefited from seeing him naked during the film’s major (and ultra-tense) fight scene. Watts was also superb in her role, and I was impressed by the filmmakers’ decision to dress her down for the entire film – her hair and especially her makeup were appropriate to the role, and while Watts is unspeakably pretty even without makeup, she was credible for the way she was presented.

The film’s ending, however, hinges on a misjudgment and a coincidence to lead to the climactic scene, which I can only imagine the scriptwriter envisioned first and had to work backwards to lead the characters to that place and situation. The misjudgment revolves around the unstated assumption that the hospital would not have a vial or two of the baby’s blood around, which strikes me as unlikely. The coincidence, the one sloppy bit of scriptwriting in the entire movie, revolves around Anna leaving the hospital just as Kirill arrives. A few seconds either way and the final scene never happens. The improbability of it all cracks the veneer of belief the film creates to that point, although the resolution itself is strong enough to complete the storyline and provide sufficient cover for the film’s few, minor lapses.

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The Bourne Ultimatum is anything but understated. It’s an American-style – or perhaps just a Hollywood-style – thriller with unambiguously drawn characters, clear good guy/bad guy delineation, and enough action to make you momentarily forget the empty-calorie plot.

The first film in the series, The Bourne Identity, had surprising meat on it because of the title character’s identity crisis: He doesn’t remember who he is and doesn’t know his capabilities, then as he learns how skilled he is, he doesn’t know how he became that way. By now, we’re fully aware of who Jason Bourne is and what he can do, so there’s no more surprise when he busts out a new foreign language or escapes from an impossible situation. There’s some cleverness to the setups in The Bourne Ultimatum, and I won’t deny that it was exciting, but it’s not a good movie so much as a good movie for its genre.

Incidentally, Matt Damon reversed course and has now signed on to appear in a fourth installment of the series, which will give Julia Stiles a chance to stand around and look pretty some more, a task for which she seems rather well qualified.