Attention, kids: This is unquestionably a spoiler article. Do not read any further if you haven't seen the film yet but intend to.

And with that ...

(remember, spoiler alert!!)

I went to see director David Cronenberg's A History of Violence suffering from a certain degree of critical hype inflation: Since so many critics I generally respect were raving about it, I thought I'd automatically love it too.

While it's a fine film in many ways, there are some big plot holes that really nag at me (there may be errors in scene descriptions as I'm doing this from memory. If I get something wrong, spank me in the comments section below).

Let's start with the first shootout in Stall's Diner that really gets the ball rolling (the bloodbath at the motel was a mere hors d'ouvere, as it were).

Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) leaps into action when two genuine psycho killers walk into his quaint little rural Middle American resto and are on the verge of offing his waitress as a prelude to robbing the joint.

He throws hot coffee in one guy's face, gets his gun and blows away the second guy who was threatening the waitress. When he's on the other side of the counter, the guy he splashed stabs him in the foot with a knife. Tom aims downward and sends a bullet through the guy's brain.

Throughout the scene, the fluidity of Tom's movements suggest someone who's done this before. And his heroics get him an ovation outside the hospital and some unwanted exposure on TV.

Then, in this bucolic little burgh out in the middle of Indiana corn country, three hard men show up. The leader is Carl Fogarty (Ed Harris), who starts flippantly calling Tom "Joey" in his diner.

What we learn from earnest old Sheriff Sam ("We take care of our own around here") is that Fogarty and his men are gangsters from Philadelphia with a history of causing peoples' lives to end prematurely.

"Are you in some kind of witness protection program?" he asks Tom, who denies it, insisting they must have the wrong guy.

Now, here's the thing. Let's say I'm Sheriff Sam. I've probably gone my whole career without dealing with anyone more dangerous than a drunken high school tough -- and now there are hardcore gangsters in my town circling one of my people like sharks. Who ya gonna call?

If it were Sheriff Bill up on screen instead of Sheriff Sam, I'd have been on the phone to the FBI yelping "Help me! Help me!" like a frightened little girl.

Another thing: In his checking of the bad men, he finds the name Richie Cusack (William Hurt), a high-level Philly gangster, but nothing about a Joey -- who just happens to be Richie's brother.

Very flawed police work, if that's the case, but if you want to buy into it, hey, it's your $10 to $14.

As a subplot, Tom's son Jack is being bullied by a jock alpha male asshole. One day at high school after the Shootout at Stall's Diner, Jack has had enough, explodes, and righteously kicks both the bully's ass and that of his sidekick.

"In this household, we don't solve our problems through violence," Tom chides Jack.

"No. In this household, we shoot people," Jack spits back sarcastically, earning him a slap in the face from Tom.

Jack scampers off, but then returns in the company of the three bad men.

Edie (Maria Bello), Tom's loving wife and practicing lawyer, watches the scene unfold from a second-floor window (while she took out a restraining order against the three, in what I presume is her panic, she doesn't try to phone Sheriff Sam).

Carl offers a simple trade: Jack goes free if Tom/Joey agrees to a little trip back to Philly.

Tom/Joey pseudo-agrees, dropping his double-barrelled shotgun and telling his son to go inside the house.

At this point, Viggo really kicks it up a notch as an actor. The light in his eyes, the slight coiling of his body and the fierce little grin on his mouth tells you some bad shit is about to happen, and he's gonna love every minute of it.

He manages to dispatch the underlings before Fogarty shoots him in the shoulder, sending a handgun flying.

"I shoulda killed you in Arizona," Joey hissed up at Fogarty, who is enjoying the fact that the mask is finally off. "Yes Joey, you should have," he replied with a cold grin -- before Jack shoots in him the back with a shotgun.

But the mask is also off for Edie.

"Who are you?" she asks her hubby later in hospital.

And the truth comes out: He really is Joey Cusack, and everything she ever believed about him is a lie. Actually, he even sounds like Joey from Philly.

The realization she's married to a killer sends her off to the hospital room's bathroom for a quick retch -- an act of over-acting that had a few people guffawing at her.

Despite some nasty hallway sex later -- which she seemed okay with at the time, but apparently felt dirtied by afterwards -- Edie wants nothing to do with her new husband Joey.

As Joey sacks out on the couch, the phone rings. And who is it but long-lost brother Richie."Hey, bro-heem, I see you're still pretty good at the killing stuff!" he chuckles. He summons Joey to Philly, and Joey goes -- like, now.

Once there, Joey meets up with one of Richie's fartcatchers, who gives him a ride to the suburban manse in a black Escalade.

"You caused me a lot of problems, bro," sighed Richie, his eyes showing the exasperation older bros reserve for mischevious younger ones.

Apparently, in his prime, Joey was just the sort of crazy killer that the other crazy killers simultaneously admired and feared.

Joey says he came to make peace and asks what he can do.

"Well, you could die," Richie says matter-of-factly.

But of course the attempt to kill him is botched, and Joey kills all of Richie's bodyguards -- and Richie too.

But Joey/Tom, standing on the edge of Richie's pond at dawn's early light, ends his moment of contemplation by tossing the handgun he was using into the water.

Tom then drives back to Indiana, slinks silently into the house (the killer leaves and you don't change the locks?) as Edie and the kids are getting ready to sup -- and is tacitly welcomed back into the family.

Nature vs. nuture

So what Cronenberg leaves us with is a guy who was a bloodthirsty gangland killer who suddenly drops out of that life (presumably in his early to mid 20s), spends three years reinventing himself as an aw-shucks small-town nice guy, marries, becomes a family man for about 17 to 20 years, and then, under the stress of the robbery and subsequent events, reverts to his old killing machine ways before finally returning to nuclear family life (and did I mention there's an 11-year spread in ages between the daughter and the son?).

My problem with Cronenberg's approach is this: It assumes violence in people is in reaction to external stimulation, not a source of stimulation in itself -- if not an addiction.

If Joey really was a mob hitman (a line of work, I think we can all agree, that one just generally doesn't fall into), he was probably a psychopath, which means he has no conscience and no ability to truly love (both excellent qualities to have in business executives, I might add). At the very least, he could have been probably diagnosed with anti-social personality disorder.

He would have been in his early to mid 20s when he decided to quit and disappear -- a remarkable act in itself, since most career criminals, let alone extremely violent ones, have poor impulse control and virtually no ability to think in the long term.*

And yet, despite having a history of engaging in the type of behaviour that made other psychopaths blush, he successfully reinvents himself as a Norman Rockwell small-town hubby and dad?

Would an explanation as to why he did that be too much to ask?

For all the time I'm presuming he was with Edie, nothing before the diner incident ever hinted at the type of man Tom really was at his core?

Is the alternative more plausible: That Joey was living a lie when he was a gangster, and Tom was his true self all along? Again, remember how his eyes lit up before the final showdown with Fogarty.

Ultimately, I can't buy the Joey-to-Tom conversion. It simply wouldn't have happened that way. For whatever reason, I think Cronenberg fundamentally misread human nature when he crafted the character of Tom/Joey. As a result, despite the fine performances by Mortensen, Hurt and Harris -- along with the solid cinematic craftsmanship, the movie didn't work for me.

I gotta wrap this up, but if you want a good look at the gangster/killer mentality to stimulate some thinking about the nature of violence, I would recommend both Mean Streets and Goodfellas, each directed by Martin Scorcese. Study Joey's character in Mean Streets (played by Robert DeNiro) and Tommy's in Goodfellas (Joe Pesci won an Oscar for best supporting actor).

(Some reviews have mentioned Taxi Driver -- another urban masterpiece of Scorsese's -- as having similarities with A History of Violence. Not true. Travis Bickle [another DeNiro character] was alienated, alone and becoming progressively more nuts. He was most likely psychotic, but not a psychopath).

If you want a great examination of a hard man's attempt to move away from his past life, I could also recommend Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven.

* A digression

While a court reporter in Regina, I did a feature on the violent offender treatment program at the Regional Psychiatric Centre in Saskatoon. In a private conversation, I asked one young criminal if he planned to give up crime when he got out. Nope, was the surprisingly honest answer. He just got too much of a rush from it.

I asked him if going going from a young offender's facility to a federal pen was a big change. "Oh yeah!" he chuckled, his eyes going wide. But then he said he just hung out with his friends, didn't get raped or piped, and found out life wasn't so bad.

A bunch of the older guys in the program -- one of whom was a mob hit guy from Hamilton --  got agitated when I mentioned that I'd read psychopaths couldn't be cured.

"Well, what's a psychopath, anyway?" scoffed one guy. "Everybody has one or two psychopathic traits to them."

When they had to go to their rooms for some administrative procedure, I mentioned their adverse reaction to the question to one of the unit's nurses. "That's because you were talking to about four or five of them," he said dryly.

Being around actual, diagnosed, institutionalized criminal psychopaths was an experience. There really was something palpably missing from these guys, a certain blankness to them. Their eyes would scan you, but you didn't get the impression that you were a person to them -- more like some type of object. If eyes are windows to the soul, these guys' eyes were roads to nowhere.

In the research I did for the main story ("Dangerous men"), psychopaths don't burn out like other criminals do. By the time most inmates hit 30 (the average age of a federal penitentiary inmate at the time of the 1992 article was 24), they start to think there might be better things to do with their lives. Psychopaths don't. Because they don't have consciences, they find it easy to kill. If they're sadistic on top of that, they take pleasure from their violence (those are rare; only about one in 40,000 psychopaths becomes a serial killer, and about one per cent of the general population could be considered psychopathic).

On top of that, psychopaths have a different brain structure than normal people. Conventional rehabilitation only seemed to make them better liars and manipulators. The last time I looked into this, forensic psychologists were trying to appeal to their self-interest ("If you do this, you'll be punished, but if you do that, you'll be rewarded"), not their consciences ("If you hurt someone, you'll feel bad." "Oh no I won't!").

That's why I find Tom's conversion in the film so fundamentally difficult to believe. You're asking a predator -- someone without a moral core; someone incapable of having a moral core -- to voluntarily become prey.