“A History of Violence” is a bizarro-world action movie. You wish the gunshots would end, the blood stop flowing and the hero cease killing bad guys long enough to sit down and eat dinner with his family. The hero isn’t much of hero, the violence is kind of gross and it all just feels so awkward. It’s a giant cinematic sleight of hand from Cronenberg, dropping us into a fantastically violent world only to pull back the curtain and show the very real consequences of those fantasies. 

Mortensen stars as Tom Stall, a loving husband and father who runs a tiny diner in a small Indiana town. He’s got a pair of cute kids, an intelligent, attractive wife and a thriving business. This comfortable life is interrupted late one night when a pair of drifters comes into Tom’s diner, desperate for cash and out for blood. Tom stops them, though, quickly and ruthlessly, to the shock of the rest of the diner’s patrons. Thanks to the media, he becomes a national hero and the diner a tourist attraction of sorts. Arriving with the flood of new customers is Carl Fogarty (Harris), a grizzled, one-eyed Mafioso who calls Tom by another name—Joey Cusack—and drops hints that Tom’s brutally heroic act wasn’t quite a fluke. That’s only the beginning of Tom’s trouble, as his family bears the burden of these seismic shifts. Wife Edie (Bello) doubts Tom’s denials of a past life, and son Jack starts dishing out violence of his own at school. When Fogarty and two fellow mob-types show up on the family’s front lawn, Tom is forced to admit, and fully embrace, his murderous past.

Unlike Cronenberg’s past films, there are no exploding heads, mutants or vestigial orifices from which to avert your eyes. The heroes and villains in “History” are regular people and the violence, gruesome as it is, is regular too. Cronenberg takes the everyman’s fantasy of inflicting massive amounts of harm upon those who’ve wronged us and turns it inside out. When he brings the camera in close to the now-disintegrated jaw of one of Tom’s first victims, Cronenberg challenges our cultural obsession with violence, our desire that it be at once bloody and visceral but also without consequence. All those action movies, they never show the guy after he gets shot, gagging and spewing blood all over the floor. We want to fight wars and drop bombs, but say no thanks to images of children with bloody, amputated limbs. In real life, Cronenberg reminds us, someone has to clean up all the mess, to deal with the aftermath, and it’s never easy.

In “History,” Tom’s family picks up those pieces and gives the movie its soul. Edie, a lawyer, is a woman who finds her marriage, and sense of justice, betrayed in one stroke. Bello gives the character the right mix of anguish and indignation. She’s strong and aggressive, but ultimately powerless in the face of her husband’s past. Meanwhile, Jack (Holmes) is a kind of reflection of his father, with an outer shell of timidity hiding a killer instinct.

What ultimately separates Jack and Tom, though, is rage—that is, Jack is full of it, while Tom is lacking. When Jack kicks the snot out of a pair of high school bullies, he’s bubbling over with anger, almost uncomfortable with his physicality; when Tom is forced to kill, it’s cold and calculated and easy. And that’s what makes Tom such a disturbing character. You’re tempted to root for him or cheer him on, but even during that first “heroic” act, it’s clear that for Tom, shooting some guy in the head is as easy as pouring a cup of coffee.

By the end, we get the expected slam-bang action-packed climax, but, of course, it all feels hollow. Real life never lives up to our fantasies, it seems, and what follows is an awkward sense of disappointment. And that’s where Cronenberg wisely leaves us—trapped in a place where there’s lots of questions, no answers and gallons of very real blood to clean up.

directed by: David Cronenberg, from a screenplay by Josh Olson, based on the graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke
starring: Viggo Mortensesn, Maria Bello, Ed Harris and Ashton Holmes
rated R for violence (obviously), as well as nudity, sex, drugs and a smattering of bad language