The End of Violence

Wim Wender's The End of Violence is a rather disjointed and uninvolving piece of film-making. It wants to be a tale about how violence affects our lives and how, once exposed to it, we find ourselves fundamentally changed. It might actually succeed if it wasn't busy confusing the audience and boring them to death at the same time.

As the film opens, we are treated to a day in the life of Hollywood producer Mike Max (Bill Pullman), who is busy wheeling and dealing through multiple phones and computer connections, all the while ignoring his wife, Paige (Andie McDowell). While he is out during the day, he is kidnapped by two not quite bright hit men who are killed in a mysterious fashion and Mike Max manages to escape. He is found dazed by some Latino gardeners and Mike decides that he needs to hide from his old life to protect himself while discovering that violence, which he has peddled in action movies, is a bad thing. Meanwhile, Paige has taken over her husbands company in his absence and developed a relationship with a recording artist named Six (K. Todd Freeman) who provides the love she was lacking in her relationship with Mike. Also meanwhile, technical whiz Ray Bering (Gabriel Byrne) is busy putting the finishing touches on a high-tech surveillance system that the government hopes to use to bring violence in the city under control. However, Ray begins to suspect that the system is possibly being used for nefarious purposes and is trying to get someone to listen to him. And yet elsewhere still, stuntwoman turned actress Cat (Traci Lind) is getting her big acting break in Mike's latest film, and she finds herself somewhat smitten with detective Dean Brock (Loren Dean) who is investigating the disappearance of Mike.

As you can probably tell from the above paragraph, The End of Violence has a lot going on. The problem is that little of it is compelling and because the film is busy juggling so many plot threads at the same time, several of them seem like afterthoughts. The subplot featuring Paige's involvement with Six, for instance, has absolutely no emotional resonance for the audience because we barely know these people. The film also takes a lot of side trips to inexplicable scenes where people gather at performance art sessions to get some bigger message across, I guess, but they just end up being pointless and drawing the film out even more.

Wenders manages to suck the life out of most of the scenes in the film. The acting is uniformly wooden and unconvincing, the characters are little more than bodies going through the motions, and the plot is half-explained and developed. Take the plot thread of Ray trying to discover the truth about the surveillance system. It is revealed eventually that he has actually already been in contact with Mike about it with the hopes of revealing the system to the public, but the film has so many pieces moving around that it takes forever to make the connection between those two characters.

The film also features dreaded voice-over monologues that are just silly and pretentious. The anti-violence message, what there is of it, is also heavy-handed, to say the least. In one scene, Six speaks to Mike on the phone and gives us a long explanation about why violence is good and people revel in it. You can practically see Wenders on his soapbox while this scene is going on.

I suppose this movie is supposed to be a thriller to some degree, but there is little that is thrilling about The End of Violence. It is a monotonous bore of a film that comes to a rather abrupt ending without really dealing with all of the issues it seems to want to explore. Instead of an end of violence, I'll take an end to this particular mess.

...or as I like to think of it, THE END OF VIOLENCE is the greatest scifi crime thriller that never was.

As always with Wim Wenders, the plot is fantastic. But, as always with Wim Wenders, the movie isn't about the plot, and those who expect to be carried by the plot will be disappointed. In the same way WINGS OF DESIRE had a great plot about angels but was not a fantasy; in the same way UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD had a great plot about a high tech dream machine but was not about technology; in the same way LISBON STORY had a riveting plot about a missing person but was not a mystery, here we have the same Wendersian formula which he pulls off flawlessly.

The plot, if you're curious, is about a futuristic "God machine" that can eliminate people with the push of a button. Designed ostensibly for crime prevention & surveillance (the old "to protect & serve" - where have we heard that before?), it gets out of control and takes murder & corruption to the next level of clinical perfection. Caught up in the game is Mike Max, a movie producer struggling with his own intense xenophobia and paranoia, which, like a disease, he himself spreads to society through his films.

That's all I'll say about the plot because (a) I don't want to ruin anything, and (b) like I said, the plot is secondary. What's really important, as you watch this movie, is to pay attention to the thought-provoking dialogue, the philosophical allusions and the overall metaphor of the situation. If you can tune into that stuff, then you're set for a great experience.

I'll give you just one example of the philosophy. There's a scene early on where they talk about the "observer effect" (you might recognize it as the paradox of "Schrödinger's cat" which you can look up on wikipedia). This is the fundamental theme of the film: the idea that, even by "impartially observing", we change the situation or in some cases destroy it. As one of the characters says, it's like "flipping on the light to observe the darkness." What a poetic & appropriate analogy.

This movie is choc full of that kind of stuff, and you may miss it if you're expecting car chases and gunfire. No, instead you get the ultimate anti-violence violence film, and I gotta give Wenders a standing ovation on being the first director I've seen pull it off.

A lot of movies in the past have carried a message of anti-violence; yet the films sink to the thrill of showing violence themselves and often glorifying it (the biggest example would be Norm Jewison's classic ROLLERBALL), and this becomes confusing if not outright hypocritical. But in this case, we get a chilling depiction of the epidemic of violence without showing any blood & guts to excite our savage instincts. It remains an intellectual film, not visceral. Don't get me wrong; this movie is plenty suspenseful, and on more than one occasion it'll have your heart flopping like an electrified noodle. But it's all done by way of the mind. To me, that's what makes this depiction of violence all the more effective & frightening: the way it's so clean & neat like in a video game. And without any fuss, someone's head could just go pop.

This is the best film I've seen in a while. I'm only taking off a few points because I wished it was twice as long & had more monologues, like some of the older Wenders films. But I have to say this film sticks to its objective and delivers a perfect product.

I don't think I've ever seen a movie that is so cerebral yet so poor at the same time. Wim Wenders is certainly revered in the film community for his offbeat ethereal productions (i.e. Wings of Desire), however, nothing profound or comprehensible can be extracted from his latest effort. It is as if four or five scripts were dropped in a studio parking lot by some clumsy intern and what was left was thrown together so that somebody wouldn't get fired. There are some common links between the characters but what does any of it have to do with the underlying plot of satellite surveillance? I kept waiting for the film to decide which plot it thought was most interesting, but it remained undecided to the very end. This was a frustrating experience to say the least.

The most aggravating aspect of this film is the fact that none of the parties involved appear to incompetent, so how is this movie so bad? Maybe I missed something...

The one saving grace of this film is the performance of Udo Kier as a German director. He alone mutters the one or two lines that managed to get me to crack a smile during this disaster.

How 'bout a four? Visually, there are some great moments. I think the most interesting scenes are those where there is no dialogue but the camera follows the characters as they inwardly contemplate what this all means (Bill Pullman, Andie McDowell). Unfortunately, we as the viewers are also given (too much) time to contemplate what it means. Everything is WAY too understated. The movie slows to a stop in many places. You start to like it (the romance with Kat and the investigator, the interaction of Bill Pullman's character and the Mexican-American people) and then it doesn't follow through. The dialogue at the film school, in which the characters give a monologue for a class is probably the most interesting dialogue. Some rap, some tell a story, some recite their own poetry. That was the most moving part of the movie. While Wenders has a important point to make, it doesn't come through clearly and the viewer is left uncaring, uninterested. Maybe the only thing that could have helped the End of Violence is more good ole fashioned...violence <g>.

This is an astounding movie, and as others have noted, it is precisely the kind of movie that passes most people by because it rocks so gently as to be almost imperceptible.

The first time I saw this, I was disappointed. 'Until the End of the World', to me, is a brilliant piece of work, with more beauty, reverie, and complexity than any ten average films put together.

So...I was ready for some heady stuff with 'End'. But the movie seemed to be lost, missing in action.

But six months later I watched it on video, and I realized I was looking at an entirely different movie.

Then I watched it again...and again, and again, until I'd seen the thing ten times, including one where I only listened to the film, to see if I was simply addicted to Wim's luminous visuals.

What you realize is that this film is cooking up some very threatening ideas about the quality and nature of love, and the companion six degrees of violence and hatred. It is really about the way in which fear and love pulse in contrary and similar ways, much like particle and wave, dancing together.

It's also a fantastic critique the "confederacy of dunces" and the manner in which we manufacture enemies to suit our paranoia.

I must say that there are few directors that move me as much as Wim Wenders, and I have to confess that I have cried many times over the beauty and grace of some of the scenes and visuals in this movie. Much like Robert Altman or Atom Egoyan, Wenders cares about people, believes in their struggles, and he creates tension that moves them, at least temporarily, to understand their natures more fully.

A masterpiece, if a masterpiece means your heart moves even slightly...

PS Ry Cooder's soundtrack is brilliant!