VIOLENT ENDS - Mark Reviews Movies

Violent Ends, Independent Film Company

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 30, 2025

Near the start of Violent Ends, one almost wants a family tree on hand to track who these characters are in relation to each other. This is about the fictional Frost family, which has been running a drug trafficking operation in rural Arkansas since the 1980s, underwent a civil war that divided the clan into those who deal in cocaine and those who handle crystal meth, and have arrived at a tenuous truce by 1992, the setting of writer/director John-Michael Powell's movie.

All of this feels like a lot to take in and remember at first, but thankfully, Powell's screenplay whittles down this plot and these relationships to the basics. There's a protagonist, whom we know to be the good guy because he doesn't want anything to do with his family business, and there are people who are with him or against him. Family ties mean little when a narrative comes down to that, and bigger themes mean even less when the story comes down to a string of clichés and some not-so-shocking twists.

That doesn't mean the movie is without its virtues. One of them is the sense of doom Powell brings to this material, with a title that comes from and an epigraph quoting William Shakepeare's notion of the results of "violent delights." For these characters, there is no escaping this world that has been shaped by and, for the next generation of the Frost family, around them.

It's not a matter of genetics or geography or some cosmic jinx, of course, but simple practicality. Most of these characters do what they were taught or the only thing that they know, and when the main character loses everything that promised a different life for him, he immediately falls back on those lessons and that knowledge—just like the rest of his kin.

The casting is another merit here, with Billy Magnussen playing protagonist Lucas with a doubly devastated quality to him. He loses that opportunity at a crime-free, ordinary life, for one thing, and as he finds himself moving closer and closer toward achieving vengeance against those who took that from him, Lucas also has a clear sense of remorse for letting himself to be pushed in the direction he had been running from for most of his life. It's a nuanced performance in a movie that doesn't have much room for subtlety elsewhere.

Powell has also filled the cast with character actors and actors who might have been movie stars, except that they seem to prefer roles and projects that allow them to be more unique as performers. In the second category, the movie has Nick Stahl as Lucas' half-brother Tuck, a man with a wife and child and who's all-too eager to join his sibling's mission because something's missing from the life he possesses, and a genuinely intimidating James Badge Dale as the villainous Sid, Lucas' cousin who plans on taking over the family business.

In the first category of actors, there are too many to name, but Kate Burton, playing Lucas and Tuck's Sheriff mother, and Ray McKinnon, as Sid's father and Lucas' uncle Walt, are the most prominent. The latter portrays a man as cunning as he is sinister, and the former is the only woman among the cast who actually has a hand in the plot, even if it is mostly in the background and the more defining characteristic of Burton's Darlene is that she's a mother.

The plot itself uses the only other woman of note in a wholly dismissive way. She's Lucas' fiancée Emma (Alexandra Shipp), who gets a couple of scenes of cute romance with her beau before she solely exists in the realm of motivating flashbacks. See, Emma is in the wrong place at the wrong time and is shot by a trio of robbers. Lucas knows his cousin Eli (Jared Bankens), also Walt's son, is involved, and if that's the case, Sid, who was recently exonerated on drug trafficking charges, must be, as well.

From there, Lucas tries to find Eli, to figure out how to connect Sid with the robbery, and to navigate the politics of his family's simmered feud, lest both sides become irritated enough by his revenge goal that they stop caring that Lucas is family. Meanwhile, Darlene does her best to keep the peace and ensure that justice is served, and it's almost impressive how the cop is somehow completely useless in solving the actual murder but also vital to uncovering a key piece of information, which confirms some first-act suspicions at the very last minute.

If not for the atmosphere—which is considerable and oppressive—and these performances, the movie almost certainly would be as disposable as any other generic revenge thriller. Because of those elements, it comes close to achieving something more than that, especially in making a point of showing that violence is brutal and bloody regardless of who—our "hero" or the villain—is perpetrating it.

Powell's depiction of this family as an inherent contradiction—loyal but only to a point, supportive of each other but only in accomplishing selfish ends, achieving "freedom" in its criminal activities but by way of bonds that are inescapable—is an intriguing concept, to be sure. Violent Ends, though, isn't as concerned with these ideas or its characters, except in the ways they can push this familiar, mostly shallow plot forward.

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