In a single essay, Mark Steyn pairs reviews of two new movies, each from high-profile directors: John Singleton's Four Brothers and David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence. Regarding the latter picture, Steyn writes:

A History of Violence is set in a neighbouring state but a world away, small-town Indiana, one of those sleepy burgs in the middle of nowhere with no reason to stop except you like the look of the diner and there won’t be another one for an hour. This diner is run by Tom (Viggo Mortensen), a likable fellow, nice family, popular in town. Near the close of business, two mean sonsofbitches wander in for a stick-up. Tom has to make an instant judgment and he judges this: that these bastards aren’t planning on leaving any witnesses. They’re threatening his waitress, they’re gonna kill her, and then him. So he brings the pot of steaming coffee down on the face of one of the punks, leaps the counter, grabs his gun and blows the other away.

As with the opening of Four Brothers, it’s a very expertly filmed scene. You’re not just admiring the choreography, you feel the rush, the psychological propulsion that gets him over the counter and to his gun. Taking out the bad guys makes Tom even more popular in town. He’s in the papers and on the TV news. The gal reporter wants to know about the killer pointing his rod: ‘How did it feel?’ ‘Not very good,’ says Tom. She turns to the camera to wrap up: ‘An American hero and a man of few words’ — and then says to her producer, ‘I guess that’s all we’re gonna get.’

But that’s not quite all. With his face plastered all over the front pages, three more hoods show up in town to see Tom — except they call him ‘Joey’. Because they knew him long ago, before he became the nice guy in the one-horse hicksville.

That’s a familiar set-up, too — the fellow reinventing himself off the beaten track until some dark secret wells up from Out of the Past, to quote a Robert Mitchum variation on the theme. Compared to the matter-of-fact title of Four Brothers, David Cronenberg positively brags about the multiple burdens he’s placing on A History of Violence. He means it first as the cliché routinely applied to two-bit hoods: ‘So-and-so had a history of violence, police said yesterday as they sifted through the crime scene...’ But, Cronenberg being Cronenberg, he also wants to give us a real history of violence, or at least a meditation on its roots and America’s propensity for it.

Yawn. I can feel myself dozing off even as I type. Cronenberg’s is a very ahistorical history of violence. He means ‘violence’ not as the word was understood up to, oh, 40 years ago, but in the latter-day leftist sense of any use of force by one person upon another. You know the phrase, uttered by terrorist apologists every few days: ‘We condemn the violence on all sides.’ Also: ‘We need to end the cycle of violence.’ It’s all ‘violence’: if Fred Smith sticks up a liquor store, that’s violent; if his brother Ted Smith joins the marines and invades Iraq, that’s violent, too. And violence only leads to more violence, just as the brutalised child will only go on to brutalise someone else. Cronenberg seems to think he’s the only fellow ever to have had this great insight, and so, parallel to the question of whether Tom’s ‘heroism’ is simply some visceral retreat to the seductive violence of Joey’s murky past, the director gives us portent-heavy scenes between father and son. The taint of violence is seeded in the next generation, with predictable consequences.

Oh, phooey. I live in a part of the world with an enormously high rate of gun ownership and no crime — mainly because you try to pull anything in my corner of New Hampshire and practically every guy, and half the women too, would respond like Tom, and think nothing of it. Cronenberg is Canadian, and in small towns north of the 49th parallel you’ll find many men who’ve committed ‘violence’ as the director defines it: they’re called veterans, and 60 years ago on beaches and in jungles they killed other men, as their fathers and grandfathers did before them. Lacking any interest in the ‘history’ of violence, Cronenberg is a prisoner of his own time, trapped in a tedious and dated reductio of his theme. What a pity. Both these films are so technically accomplished, so skilfully wrought, but the insularity of their world view in the end gives them nothing to say.