The old adage that every story has been told before is true. So is the fact that, in terms of making something compelling, it’s all about how you tell that story. A man violently avenging the death of the woman he loves is something we’ve seen a million times, but there’s no reason it can’t be exciting or involving in the right hands; on the other hand, it’s just as easy to get something like Violent Ends, which feels too mundane to ever achieve much impact. Set in 1992, the film stars Billy Magnussen as Lucas Frost, who was born into a large Southern crime family but is doing his best to avoid that life. But when a case of bad timing leads to the death of his fiancée, Emma (Alexandra Shipp), during a botched robbery involving his own cousins, well, let’s just say they’ve pushed him too far.
Violent Ends
2.5
/5
- Director
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John-Michael Powell
- Writers
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John-Michael Powell
- Producers
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Vincent Sieber
Written and directed by John-Michael Powell, Violent Ends plays things very straight and serious. And yet, it invites a certain glibness, because it also can’t help but fall into clichés it’s never able to subvert. That’s immediately apparent in how Powell positions Emma’s death as a huge emotional loss without giving us nearly enough to feel the impact in any genuine way. We get one cutesy scene showing Lucas and Emma’s affection for each other to spotlight their relationship, and then she’s just present but not central to a couple other moments before her death. Shipp has plenty of innate charisma, but she still can’t do much with such a thinly defined character. And the use of the “dead wife” cinematic trope as Lucas thinks back on their happy times — depicted via a montage of out-of-context shots of them blissfully running around smiling and laughing together in moments we never saw before, as though they’re in a commercial for a medication with a long list of potential side effects — can’t help but feel unintentionally comical.
Though he has stage and screen credits going back 20 years, Magnussen is probably best known to mainstream audiences for his supporting roles in huge Disney hits Aladdin and Lilo & Stitch, where he played amusingly dimwitted supporting characters. He’s very good in Violent Ends, impressively changing both his appearance with the addition of shaggy hair and a beard and his demeanor from those types of roles. Powell certainly made some great casting choices, including Nick Stahl as Lucas’ half-brother, Tuck, who’s traditionally been the more troubled one among the siblings. Even in his early days as a child actor, the extremely talented Stahl seemed poised for greater stardom, and it’s always a pleasure to see him back on screen. Here, he imbues Tuck with a certain guarded weariness.
In general, though, it feels like the talented cast is being asked to do too much heavy lifting here. This is certainly the case for the film’s villain, Lucas and Tuck’s nefarious cousin Sid (James Badge Dale). Dale is a great actor, but he has to overcome a lot of silliness in this role, starting with his character’s epically ugly haircut. Truly, this haircut is insanely distracting — it looks like Sid asked for his hair to be cut like Moe from The Three Stooges, and then someone managed to screw that up by cutting too much away from the back. It’s so notable that it then becomes strange when no other character ever mentions how he looks. On top of that, the fact that Sid is bad and nasty and gross is underlined to a ridiculously unsubtle extent: In one scene, he uses his hands to shove shredded meat into his mouth, which he then devours with loud smacking noises. Still, Dale’s swagger gives the character a certain spark that makes him a more alluring villain than he otherwise might be.
It feels like Powell wanted the film to feel operatic, beginning with onscreen text that gives viewers loads of specific backstory about three brothers who went to war with each other in the 1980s in a battle over the local drug trade. Most of these minutiae turn out to be absolutely unnecessary, given that the film’s focus isn’t on the brothers, but on one of their sons. To be fair, the idea of a long-running and often violent rivalry within this extended family is intriguing, but we never get more than a cursory overview of it.
Ironically, this is probably best exemplified by one of Powell’s strongest inclusions in the story — Lucas and Tuck’s mother Darlene. She’s played by the fantastic Kate Burton, and stands out as an intriguing character because she’s a cop whose family has almost all embraced crime. Darlene gets a lot of screen time in the film, and with Burton playing her, she’s very engaging as we see her no-nonsense, determined investigation play out. Yet, her presence also opens up a lot of interesting questions Powell never engages in: How did someone noble and honorable, much less one with her particular job, even become involved with the infamous Frost family? How did she stay a cop, despite what was going on around her? What is her relationship like now with anyone else in the extended family besides her sons? None of this is ever explored.
An Arkansas native himself, Powell does bring a vivid, lived-in feeling to the larger world we see in Violent Ends, which makes good use of genuine Arkansas locations. There are a couple of moments here that play as appropriately tense, including some well done gun battles where Powell does his best to play things as real and brutal rather than sensationalized. Overall, though, it feels like an echo of better films, rather than a new spin on this type of story. The final scene attempts to once more frame Violent Ends as a tragedy, yet, unfortunately, only serves as a reminder that this is a rather hollow take on the revenge tale. Perhaps the film would have been better served going for something slicker and more sensationalist, given that it doesn’t hit the mark in terms of deeper emotion.
From the Independent Film Company, Violent Ends opens in select theaters on October 31.
This story originally appeared on Movieweb
