Only God Forgives
★★
Dir: Nicolas Winding Refn
(2013)
When Ryan Gosling "tight-lipped" his way through Drive, a little collective shiver went through every man and woman in the cinema. Nicolas Winding Refn had ripped off the coolness and pace of both Walter Hill's The Driver and Jean-Piere Melville's influencing Le Samouraï in one fell swoop. A cooler than thou soundtrack and some slick slo-motion cinematography did the rest and the film lit up most of the major film cities. Refn and Gosling get the lightning rod out again and try to light up this sombre, cold and heartless slice of style pie but despite Kristen Scott Thomas chiming in with a few well place expletives and some pretty photography by Larry Smith, Only God Forgives is pretty much an all out failure.
When Julian (Gosling) finds out his brother has been murdered he is forced on to the warpath by his patriarchal nightmare of a mother (Scott-Thomas) in a staggeringly neon lit Bangkok. The man he is up against is a sword wielding cop named Chang and that's about that. Most of the rest of the film is filled up with embarrassingly posed but fantastically lit tableaux poses by the cast and not brain-shafting ultra-violence which most critics would have you believe.
It is a violent film of course with Refn at the helm but it feels like the so called violence pornographer is taking it easy here or bizarrely trying to layer his biff, biff, pow, pow with all kinds of wrong footed oedipal complexes. It's both obvious and boring when Only God Forgives finally comes down to the crunch; Partly because the silent cool of Gosling has gone too far here, drifting through shots like a mannequin in a shopping trolley, the whole thing becomes a tonally repetitive mess. It is a film stripped of character and pumped with style steroids and, up the big screen you'll be somewhat pleased, but afterwards, even the insane Scott-Thomas, it simply feels empty, stupid and lazy.
It's hard to accuse Refn and Eyes Wide Shut cinematographer Smith of being lazy in their work though; Their technical skill is beautiful to watch, borrowing from Gaspar Noé and even Christopher Doyle but even with all the red neon heat it really does feel like a tragic opera without the song. In the end Only God Forgives shows some wonder on top but nothing what so ever below the surface.
