Director David Cronenberg, one-time horror icon, continues to branch into the gangster genre of film with his follow-up to A History of Violence, the Russian mafia-centered, Oscar-nominated melodrama Eastern Promises. Viggo Mortensen stars, as he did in History, as a tough gangster type, with Cronenberg once again peppering his trademark outlandish and extreme violence into the story of a mobster with a heart of gold. It is Mortensen who has earned the film's sole Oscar nomination, for Best Actor.

The Acting category of the Academy Awards is no more or less questionable than other categories - a high-budgeted film involving prolonged nudity or the handicapped almost certainly will net at least one nomination in Best Actor, Supporting Actor, Actress, or Supporting Actress. The nude and/or sex scenes in Monster's Ball, About Schmidt, Titanic, and Boys Don't Cry were all deemed "daring" and "brave" enough to get nods, to name a few. Eastern Promises is no exception. The centerpiece of the film seems to be one of the aforementioned scenes of outlandish and extreme violence, in which a stark naked Mortensen must fight off his would-be assassins in a steam room. Mercifully stopping short of slow motion, the scene bars no holds, and we get a lesson is basic physics as we see the equal-and-opposite reaction of Mortensen's entire anatomy as he executes well-placed kicks on the villain's chest.

Aragon's . . . I mean Mortensen's Oscar nomination surely was inspired by this "brave" scene, because although for the rest of the film he is perfectly good at what he does, not a lot is required of him. His character is a simple gangster stereotype - actually, after the film's final twist, you realize it's a combination of two simple gangster stereotypes - and no matter what accent he had to fake, he is still essentially playing Scarface for the upteenth time since 1933. This isn't really a weakness of the film, as I honestly believe it wants nothing more than to be a simple melodrama, but, like the movie itself, it is not exceptional.

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Of course, nude scenes are not the only reason anyone earns a nomination for acting. Movies with sympathetic people who happen to have a vaguely-defined mental challenge also earn nominations. Luckily, Eastern Promises has one of those as well, though not Mortensen (what a deadly combination that would have been!). One of the more pointless characters of the film is the son of one of the gangsters, who is mentally challenged in some way, and who is included in the narrative solely so the audience can shed a little tear for the poor challenged gangster when he dies. Again, in the context of a melodrama, this isn't really an offense, but it's hard to take films like Eastern Promises seriously, which seems to be what it wants you to do.

The subtext of Cronenberg's last film, A History of Violence, implied by its title and its archetypal characters, is that America tends to forget the hundreds of years of violence upon which its society is based. Sure, America likes to think it has "settled down," "found a new life" and "is the head cook at a diner," but lingering in our collective unconscious is that we owe our happiness to years of violence and oppression, and that this history effects our current lives in ways we can't even trace - or don't want to. Eastern Promises has very little subtext. The story is: A 14 year-old Russian immigrant prostitute dies in childbirth in London, Naomi Watts tries to figure out who's to blame (while faking a London accent), Viggo Mortensen is a gangster who wants to help but can't (while faking a Russian accent), the Russian mob is really evil. It stops somewhere short of being a social problem film, somewhere short of being a thriller, and somewhere short of being memorable.

Maybe I'm missing something here, but other than the occasional over-the-top violence, Eastern Promises is almost too easy to digest, featuring very simple morals, dialogue and human-human relations. It is enjoyable, but not one which will be easy to recall ten years from now, depending on how much the steam room scene affected you. If you want a simple melodrama with the occasional cool fight scene, this film's for you. But I'm going to have to weed through more of these Oscar nominations to find something truly great.