The willingness of DC owners Warner Bros. and subsidiary New Line Cinema to just hand out film rights to DC Comics characters and stories to any filmmaker has often had drawbacks throughout history. However, it’s also led to some deeply eclectic movies stemming from the vast amount of properties in the DC library. This label isn’t just Superman and Batman, it’s also contained imprints that over the years included everything from Impact Comics to Paradox Press to Wildstorm and so many more.
Through these labels, projects like Stardust, Road to Perdition, and The Kitchen are all adaptations of DC Comics materials, albeit through its imprint entities. This has also included a smattering of adaptations of Vertigo Comics titles, with this imprint being a home (from 1993 to 2020) for adult-skewing productions with graphic material. This is where the origins of the greatest DC movie can be traced. A History of Violence isn’t just another outstanding collaboration between Viggo Mortensen and director David Cronenberg. It’s also the pinnacle of DC movie adaptations.
A History of Violence started life as a 1997 graphic novel from writer John Wagner and illustrator Vince Locke. In film form, it’s the saga of mild-mannered diner owner Tom Stall (Mortensen), who has carved out a quiet life in Millbrook, Indiana with wife Edie (Maria Bello) and two kids. After he saves his eatery from two robbers, his past begins to catch up to him. Mobster Carl Fogarty (Ed Harris) shows up and refuses to leave Stall or his family alone. Fogarty claims Stall is a mob hitman who needs to come back and embrace his past. Stall isn’t quite ready to do just that.
Cronenberg’s career has been defined by films about transformations. Most famously, these manifest as titles about men slowly turning into human/fly hybrids or other visible contortions of the human body. Within A History of Violence, this concept takes on a more interior approach. Who is Tom Stall? Is the man Edie and their kids love real or just a facade meant to put distance between Stall and his past? The malleability of human beings is explored in such fascinating and harrowing ways throughout A History of Violence. Josh Olson’s screenplay and the vivid source material let Cronenberg play with conceptually familiar themes in such a distinctive fashion.
Cronenberg also excels at realizing tense thriller sequences that effortlessly leave you clutching your breath. Such masterful suspenseful set pieces often fascinatingly emphasize the brutality of violence in this world. Rarely does carnage appear on-screen in a “cool” fashion. The price of bloodshed is a heavy one and that informs how gunfire and fistfights materialize within A History of Violence‘sgrim world. These action-heavy scenes are just as transfixing as the more intimate sequences chronicling how duplicity begins to wear on Tom and Edie. In every respect (including in its top-tier performances), A History of Violence is spectacular.
It’s completely understandable A History of Violence doesn’t come up more in discussions about DC Comics cinema. After all, the feature is barely connected to the DC brand, the DC logo isn’t on the film, and it’s not the kind of feature people associate with DC film adaptations. However, why doesn’t A History of Violence come up more in modern great cinema discussions? The answer likely is because it doesn’t fit the mold (at least on the surface) of a “typical” Cronenberg movie. The gooier, more horror-leaning Cronenberg movies like The Fly or Dead Ringers tend to get talked about when this filmmaker’s name comes up.
Grounded crime thrillers like A History of Violence (or another top-notch Cronenberg/Mortensen collaboration, Eastern Promises) tend to get forgotten in Cronenberg discussions. Meanwhile, A History of Violence is the kind of mid-budget movie major studios rarely make anymore. Without a deluge of contemporary spiritual companions, there aren’t a lot of reasons for people to immediately bring up A History of Violence. When the silver screen isn’t filled with mid-budget crime thrillers, it’s easy to forget the greatest titles in this domain.
Further problems, like the lack of a massive online fan base for Mortensen’s dramatic work, have ensured A History of Violence doesn’t get talked about enough in the modern world. Still, not everyone has forgotten about this excellent motion picture. New DC Studios head James Gunn, for one, listed Violenceas one of his favorite comic book movies of all-time. Shazam! director David F. Sandberg is also reportedly a big fan of the movie and it still appears on lists of greatest comic book movies with no superheroes. Plus, if nothing else, A History of Violence crystallizes how wildly varying the world of DC Comics film adaptations can be.
The willingness of DC owners Warner Bros. and subsidiary New Line Cinema to just hand out film rights to DC Comics characters and stories to any filmmaker has often had drawbacks throughout history. However, it’s also led to some deeply eclectic movies stemming from the vast amount of properties in the DC library. This label Read More