Some movies are so derivative that it seems like their characters must be the only people on Earth who haven’t seen them before. Few of those movies, however, are as muscular and red-blooded as John-Michael Powell’s “Violent Ends,” a chewy — if not downright overcooked — feast of an Ozark anti-Western that claims to be inspired by true events (specifically, the unraveling of Arkansas’ most powerful crime family), but feels significantly more indebted to the stuff of “Unforgiven,” “Blue Ruin,” and Jeff Nichols’ “Shotgun Stories.” While too labored to live up to its self-evident inspirations, this fatalistic revenge saga is so unrepentant towards its own movie-ness that its canned dialogue and clichéd story beats often present an engrossing 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 within the world of the film into which he was born, and so he soon finds himself with no choice but to declare an 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 slurred together from such a familiar combination of backwater lawlessness, faux-polite menace, and profoundly sweaty animal metaphors.
But in order to enjoy “Violent Ends” on those terms, you first have to accept the premise that Lucas Frost (the elastic Billy Magnussen, making a solid case for himself as a genuine leading man) doesn’t know he’s been cast as the main character of a contrived thriller about how an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind. At least not at first. You have to believe that his incarcerated coke kingpin of a father always talks in quasi-religious parables, and that his bank teller fiancée — Alexandra Shipp as the appropriately named Emma Darling, a beaming angel of a woman who coerces Lucas into a rom-com worthy grand gesture by the end of her first scene — might credibly exist within the desolate Appalachian context of a film whose average character is just a couple of face tattoos away from going full “Winter’s Bone.”
It’s a context that Lucas is keen to escape while he can: It’s the fall of 1992, George Bush the elder is about to lose his bid for another presidency, and the Arkansas police are enjoying a brief detente in the drug war between the two rival sides of the Frost clan. But nobody is enjoying it more than Lucas’ slick-talking but clearly sociopathic cousin Sid (the ever-watchable James Badge Dale, even less restrained than usual in a role so slathered 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 seize the whole cartel operation for himself.
“Violent Ends” does a poor job of laying out the Frost family tree (its wall of opening text fails to establish the who’s who we need to fully understand the dynamics at work), but it’s clear enough that Sid embodies everything that Lucas is desperate to reject within himself. If only it were that easy to cast aside 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 rocks his world apart: “You’re a rattlesnake, son. Just like me.”
Lucas doesn’t get to witness said robbery first-hand, which is a shame, as the sight of someone getting shot in the chest and just standing perfectly still and wide-eyed as their shirt bleeds red would be his biggest clue so far that he’s in an overbroad — albeit geographically specific — movie about how violence begets nothing but violence. Alas, he sees just enough to abandon his plans for a better life and try to exact vengeance on the responsible party, whomever that might be. We see the killer’s face and have no doubt as to what happened, but Powell’s script — so obvious about the rest of its plotting — insists on treating the murder with a veneer of mystery, which contributes to a torpid second that’s too saturated with numbing synths and genre posturing to seize on the film’s most interesting tensions.
Specifically: that between Lucas and his half-brother Tuck (a wounded Nick Stahl, drawing on his own history with addiction to create an achingly lived-in portrait of a decent man who’s struggling to resist the gravity of his own weakness). For all of the sullied virtue that Magnussen commands in the lead role, “Violent Ends” wouldn’t really spark to life or feel like it had any meaningful stakes to it if not for how Tuck’s soul hangs in the balance. As someone with one foot in the Frost mishegoss and one foot in the normal family life that 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 clearly adores his characters, and is eager to highlight the humanity that surges beneath their circumstances, but Tuck alone allows him to do that to meaningfully stirring effect.
By contrast, Sid spends most of his time preening like a supervillain, while the film never seriously explores what it means for Lucas’ mom (Kate Burton) to work as a cop — her role seems reverse-engineered from the wonderful shot that all of the film’s drama builds towards 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 smart and visceral approach to staging rich action on a budget (the movie looks great in all respects, with Elijah Guess’ cinematography finding vivid streaks of natural beauty atop a bedrock of dour Appalachian gray), and palpably freighted with all of the emotion that percolates too far under the surface during much of the story.
Powell is an exceptionally promising filmmaker, but by the time he arranges all of his ducks in a row for the finale, he’s lost track as to whether Lucas is continuing the cycle of vengeance that has poisoned so much of his family, or if he’s breaking it. While “Violent Ends” asks you to reckon with the futility of violence, it (violently) delights in its bloodshed too much to pull that off, as Lucas — a natural rattlesnake — is left with no other choice but to bite his own tail. Alas, this was the movie into which he was born; the great tragedy of Lucas’ life is that he wasn’t born into a better one.
Grade: C+
“Violent Ends” is now playing in theaters.
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