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Eastern Promises promises (heh) to be a different kind of gangster movie, but it doesn’t really offer anything interestingly new to the genre, not even the twist towards the end. In fact, it even provides the cliched segment where the police detective goes into a lecture of describing what the various kinds of gangster tattoos mean.

Basically, the movie faithfully follows a gangster-film formula - gritty atmosphere, hard-core criminals, crime-family politics. Viggo Mortensen adds nicely to his diverse repetoire of leading roles (though nowhere near as diverse as that of Kevin Bacon), playing a limo driver for a crime family.