This combination of thriller and drama spiced up a bit by Romeo + Juliet to Forbidden Love was one of those films that even promised in the beginning, but very quickly “The Violent Heart” got pretty lost and became a completely predictable, real movie chamomile. Somewhere in the middle of the film, one could sense that the romance between the rebellious 18-year-old white Cassie (Grace Van Patten) and four-year-old Daniel (Jovan Adepo) would end. And not just the romance, but the whole film in the introduction of which we discover how fifteen years earlier, when Daniel was still a boy, his sister was killed. He’s stuck with a film written and directed by a certain Kerem Sanga halfway between a melodrama and a murder / mystery thriller and there’s not much to catch on to throughout the story.
Cassie is a talented, beautiful graduate, an excellent student, whose best friend is also her father Joseph (Lukas Haas). He is also her English teacher, they correspond on their cell phones during class, they tell each other everything, and that trust between them will break when Cassie finds her uncle locked in a classroom with a fellow teacher. It’s not hard to imagine what Cassie thought when she caught them in such a situation, and in parallel with the loss of trust in her father, she will start a relationship with a young car mechanic Daniel, whom she met quite by accident. Daniel ended up in prison as a teenager because he blinded a colleague during a school fight, and the fact that he was behind bars determined his life. Anyway, he tries to enroll in the Marines, and the young man is full of anger, bitterness and feelings of inferiority.
Had it not been for the introduction to the murder of Daniel’s daughter, “The Violent Heart” would have seemed to be one of those typical films about an interracial relationship that is not thrilled by family members on either side. Those racial tensions in a small town in Tennessee where Daniel’s family members seem to be the only blacks here (maybe not, but I think all the other characters in the film are white), Sanga seems to have decided to suppress and didn’t dare do anything more provocative and ride more honestly on the subject than somehow in gloves. And in the end, there is a somewhat banal, completely predictable solution that somehow catches the eye. Too bad, because this was a film that promised and had potential for a while, but it delivered a little of that. Rating 6/10.
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