If there's but one thing to take away from Cronenberg's vision of the tattooed Russian mafia, it's this one fight. Eastern Promises is a decent, rather dull film (albeit with a fantastic performance from Viggo Mortensen), but the shockingly vicious sauna fight makes the entire flick worth enduring. I've always believed that the best fights are the few which make one believe that the protagonist might just meet his untimely end and Eastern Promises had me pre-thinking an obituary statement for our story's central figure. After being lured into the misty innards of a sauna, Nikolai is beset by two black-clad goons with hooked blades. What makes this grisly encounter so audacious is that Mr. Mortensen does it all in the buff. No clothes at all. Hell, not even a towel is able to cover his naked body from the attack. The nudity is extremely explicit, but it serves a most primal purpose. At his most vulnerable, Nikolai fights back with an unequivocally animalistic force that even his antagonists aren't prepared for. Even with a body carved from head to toe and bludgeoned by fists, Nikolai disregards pain and bests both hooligans with their own weapons. Is a curved knife to the base of the skull too tame for ya? How about one twisted inside a screaming gangster's eye socket?