Some movies are so derivative that it seems their characters must be the only people on earth who haven’t seen them before. However, few of these films are as muscular and red-blooded as John-Michael Powell’s “Violent ends,” a chewy — if not downright overcooked — feast of one Ozark anti-western that claims to be inspired by true events (especially the breakup of Arkansas’ most powerful crime family), but feels considerably more guilty about the stuff in “Unforgiven,” “blue ruin,” and Jeff Nichols ”Stories about shotguns.” While too strained to live up to its obvious inspirations, this fatalistic revenge tale is so unrepentant of its own cinematic feel that its canned dialogue and clichéd beats often provide a captivating counterpoint to its vividly authentic sense of time and place.
Powell’s tragic hero is doomed from the moment he dares to do something “original” with his life, an ambition that could never be realized in the world of the world. film into which he was born, and so he soon finds himself with no choice but to declare open war against his own bloodline; to so violently confront the Southern-fried tropes that have always defined his family that future generations might have a chance to exist within the pages of a less predictable script. One that isn’t cobbled together from an all-too-familiar combination of backwater lawlessness, faux-polite menace, and deeply sweaty animal metaphors.
But in order to enjoy “Violent Ends” on these terms, you must first accept the premise that Lucas Frost (the spring Billy Magnussenwho makes a solid case for himself as a genuine leading man) doesn’t know he’s been cast as the main character in a contrived thriller about how an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. At least not at first. You have to believe that his imprisoned coke kingpin of a father always speaks in quasi-religious similes, and that his bank teller fiancee – Alexandra Shipp as the aptly named Emma Darling, a radiant angel of a woman who forces Lucas into a rom-com worthy grand gesture at the end of her first scene in the film’s desolate character that can be created by an average character. just a few face tattoos away from getting drunk on “Winter’s Bone”.
It’s a context Lucas is anxious to escape while he can: It’s the fall of 1992, George Bush Sr. is about to lose his bid for another presidency, and the Arkansas police are enjoying a brief lull in the drug war between the two rival sides of the Frost clan. But no one enjoys it more than Lucas’s slick-talking but distinctly sociopathic cousin Sid (the ever-watching James Badge Dale, even less restrained than usual in a role so smeared with extra sauce that the actor literally has to lick his fingers clean between some of his lines), who sees this as a golden opportunity to take on the whole cartel business.
“Violent Ends” does a poor job of laying out the Frost family tree (its wall of introductory text fails to establish who is who we need to fully understand the dynamics at work), but it’s clear enough that Sid embodies everything Lucas is desperate to reject within himself. If only it were so easy to throw away one’s inheritance. As his father told him at the end of a long-winded story about a Pentecostal preacher, and as Lucas will soon learn the hard way for himself after a robbery gone wrong shakes his world apart: “You’re a rattlesnake, son. Just like me.”
Lucas doesn’t get to witness this robbery firsthand, which is a shame, because the sight of someone getting shot in the chest and just standing there, wide-eyed as their shirt bleeds red, would be his biggest clue yet that he’s in an overarching — if geographically specific — movie about how violence leads to nothing but violence. Unfortunately, he sees just enough to abandon his plans for a better life and seek revenge on the responsible party, whoever that may be. We see the killer’s face and have no doubts about what happened, but Powell’s script—so obvious about the rest of its plot—insists on treating the murder with a veneer of mystery, contributing to a languid second that’s too saturated with numbing synths and genre tropes to capture the film’s most interesting tensions.
Specifically: that between Lucas and his half-brother Tuck (a wounded Nick Stahl, who draws on his own history of addiction to create a painfully lived-in portrait of a decent man struggling to face the gravity of his own weakness). For all the tarnished virtues that Magnussen commands in the lead role, “Violent Ends” wouldn’t really spark to life or feel like it had any meaningful stake if it weren’t for the way Tuck’s soul hangs in the balance. As someone with one foot in Frost mishegoss and one foot in the normal family life Lucas aspires to, Tuck is the only person in this story whose fate doesn’t feel like a foregone conclusion, and the handful of scenes where Powell centers him are by far the richest things here. The writer/director for sure idolize his characters and is keen to highlight the humanity that emerges in their circumstances, but Tuck alone allows him to do so to meaningfully moving effect.
By contrast, Sid spends most of his time preening as a supervillain, while the film never really explores what it means to Lucas’ mother (Kate Burton) to work as a cop—her role seems reverse-engineered from the wonderful shot on which the entire film’s drama builds after Lucas is able to bend the cycle of violence into something of a straight line. It’s a striking image, typical of Powell’s clever and visceral approach to staging rich action on a budget (the film looks good in every respect, with Elijah Guess’s cinematography finding vivid streaks of natural beauty atop a bedrock of sour Appalachian grey), and palpably freighted with all the emotions that seep through too far below the surface.
Powell is an exceptionally promising filmmaker, but as he gets all his ducks in a row for the finale, he’s lost track of whether Lucas is continuing the cycle of revenge that has poisoned so much of his family, or whether he’s breaking it. While “Violent Ends” asks you to reckon with the futility of violence, it (violently) revels in its gore too much to handle it, as Lucas – a natural rattlesnake – has no choice but to bite his own tail. Alas, this was the film he was born for; the great tragedy of Lucas’s life is that he was not born a better one.
Grade: C+
“Violent Ends” is now in theaters.
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