A Christmas baby, orphaned in the delivery room and provisionally named Christine ("Sounds like Christmas"), leads a London midwife (Naomi Watts) on a quest for the infant's nearest relative, and straight into the dark heart of the Russian mafia: a deceptively avuncular restaurateur (Armin Mueller-Stahl), his loose-cannon son (Vincent Cassel), and their stoical chauffeur and bodyguard (Viggo Mortensen). For extra "motivation," when things get dicey, the heroine is made to be half-Russian herself, with a stillborn baby in her background. Cult director David Cronenberg, following along the trail of A History of Violence, opens himself up for broader consumption, a tepid thriller with a maudlin streak and a pallid image, lacking his trademark slime element, notwithstanding a slit throat here and there, a pruned finger, a punctured eyeball. The pièce de résistanceis a fight-to-the-death in a Turkish bath between two armed and fully clothed thugs and a vulnerably au naturel Viggo, covering up, despite all the rough-and-tumble, a bit more demurely than in the early days of The Indian Runner. (2007) — Duncan Shepherd
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