Diksha Sundriyal
Directed by John-Michael Powell, ‘Violent Ends’ follows the story of a man who is forced to do some terrible things in a quest for revenge. Set in the early 1990s in Arkansas, the film examines the true nature of a person’s legacy and questions whether there really is a way to end a cycle of violence without getting violent in the process. The desire for revenge also becomes an important point as the character goes on a journey where it becomes clear that when the time comes to put his enemy in the ground, he should dig one more grave. SPOILERS AHEAD.
Violent Ends Plot Synopsis
The Frosts have been a prominent crime family in Arkansas, with the business divided between three brothers: Ray, Donny, and Walt. While Ray and Donny have the cocaine business, Walt handles meth, and neither side crosses into the business of the other to keep them from going to war with each other. For a while, this system seemed to work, and there were no conflicts. Now, Ray is in prison, where he is visited by his son, Lucas, who wants nothing to do with his family’s criminal business. Lucas is engaged to Emma, and to sever his connection with his father’s side of the family permanently, he has decided not to visit Ray in prison anymore. Meanwhile, Lucas’ half-brother, Tuck, is dealing with personal issues.
Lucas and Tuck’s mother, Darlene, is a police officer who intimately knows the Frost family’s dynamic and prefers that her sons stay out of it. Around the same time, Walt’s eldest son, Sid, is released from prison, and that’s when trouble begins. One morning, Lucas drives Emma to a mechanic shop where she has to deliver cheques from the bank. While she is in there, three masked men arrive to rob the place. They don’t intend to kill anyone, but the nervous guy ends up shooting Emma in the chest. As the three of them run away, the shooter takes off his mask and turns out to be Walt’s second son, Eli. Lucas sees Eli, but it isn’t until he enters the shop that he realizes what has happened. He shares this information with Darlene, but Eli has gone into hiding.
Darlene assures her son that she will find Eli and bring him to justice. She tells him to hang tight and do nothing, or he will end up flaring up an already volatile situation. However, Lucas is triggered by Sid’s repeated actions. First, Sid shows up at Emma’s funeral. Then he leaves a box with a rattlesnake outside Tuck’s house, where he lives with his wife and daughter. In the meantime, Sid also makes a move on his uncle’s business, killing Donny and his sons, including the 17-year-old Bryce, with whom Lucas was on great terms. Lucas finds an opportunity to trade the business for Eli with Walt, but instead, his uncle turns hostile, forcing the grieving Frost to choose a path that ends with blood and loss for everyone.
Are Eli, Sid, and Walt Dead?
When Lucas goes to Walt with the offer of giving over his father’s business in return for Eli, Walt burns his face with an iron-brander. He leaves Lucas and Tuck with cocaine and calls the cops on them. They are booked, but Tuck’s wife posts their bail. Before leaving the police station, Lucas finds a document with Eli’s name on it. On it is the name of Lou Byers, whose house Darlene had visited earlier with the suspicion of harboring Eli. Lucas and Tuck head to Lou’s place, and sure enough, they find Eli soundly asleep in his bed. Before they can take him, Lou attacks them. He shoots Lucas, forcing him and Tuck to run into the woods for their lives. Eli and Lou come after them, but eventually Tuck and Lucas trap them.
They tie up Lou and Eli in the barn behind the house. When Lucas asks if Eli really killed Emma, he tearfully agrees. Lucas talks about how Emma would have wanted him to forgive Eli, and while he does say “I forgive you,” he also shoots his cousin in the head. He goes back into the house, calls Sid to let him know what he has done, and asks him to come to Tuck’s house by the lake to settle the score. Before leaving, he kills Lou as well. The gunshots trigger a call to the cops, and Darlene arrives at the barn to find two dead bodies. She realizes what has happened and that her sons are involved, but she has no idea that they have slipped past her and are preparing for something worse. At Tuck’s house, the brothers create traps around the place, ready to take on Sid.
Sid arrives with two men, one of whom dies, while the other shoots Tuck. Lucas tells him to go to the boat, but Sid finds him. This leaves an injured Tuck having a gun pointed at him by Sid, who has a gun pointed at him by Lucas, who has a gun pointed at him by Sid’s man. This would have put Lucas at a disadvantage if it hadn’t been for Darlene arriving just in time to point her gun at Sid’s man. Lucas doesn’t want to lose his brother, but Sid starts saying it was Tuck’s idea to rob the shop in the first place. Lucas realizes that Tuck had called in sick that day and asks his brother if he really is responsible for Emma’s death.
Sid reveals that Tuck owes him a lot of money and, to pay it back, points to the mechanic shop, claiming it would be empty and easy to rob. They didn’t expect Emma, but clearly, she wouldn’t have died if Tuck had just settled his debts. The argument escalates with everyone firing shots forward. Darlene’s shot kills Sid’s man, whose shot injures but doesn’t kill Lucas, whose shot kills Sid, who’d shot Tuck. While Darlene tends to her other son, Lucas ties Sid up at the back of his car and drives all the way to Walt’s place. Walt is heartbroken to see his son’s dead body, and the moment he and Lucas see each other, they fire bullets. Lucas’ bullet hits Walt right in the head, and he dies on the spot.
Are Lucas and Tuck Dead?
Lucas had grown up around the violence of his family. He had seen his father, his uncles, and his cousins get involved in bad things, commit atrocious acts, and go in and out of prison. As a child, he didn’t have much choice in the things around him, but when he grew up, he decided he wanted nothing to do with the Frost name. So, when he tells his father the news of his engagement and the possibility of having more children, it is not to ensure that the Frost line is extended, but to show him he was ready to move on once and for all. His father, however, warned him that while he could choose not to indulge, his very nature was to be violent. This was the only legacy that came with the Frost name, and he could run from it for only so long.
At the time, Lucas believed he could change things for himself, but Emma’s death confirmed that anyone coming in contact with their family was tainted with the same violent touch of fate. No matter what he did, he couldn’t run away from it or stop it from coming after him. So, in the end, he decides to put an end to it once and for all. Initially, his target had been Eli. Had he been arrested and sent to prison for his crimes, Lucas might have found it in himself to grieve his wife and move on. But when it becomes clear that Eli’s father and brother are not going to let him face justice, Lucas not only decides to answer violence with violence, but also makes sure that this is where the cycle ends. For that, everyone has to die.
The moment Lucas kills Eli, he knows Sid will come after him, and the moment Sid dies, he knows Walt will come after him. This is why he kills them all in a matter of brutal 24 hours. With Donny and his sons dead, Ray and Lucas are the only Frosts left. However, when Lucas shoots Eli, Eli shoots Tuck, who is already injured. The second bullet does the job and kills him on the spot. Later, when Lucas shoots Walt, he is also shot in return. The bullet catches him in the throat, and within a few minutes, he has bled to death. In his final moments, he thinks back to the time when he went fishing with Emma, and she asked him to marry her. They’d taken a picture that had sat on her office desk. It is that happy moment that remains in Lucas’ mind before he dies, effectively ending the Frost line for good.
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