Remember how much I enjoyed Drive with Ryan Gosling? Well, he teamed up again with the same director, Denmark's Nicolas Winding Refn, and here we are to see whether Only God Forgives can continue the strong showing of their previous collaboration.
The film is set in Bangkok and right off the bat we are introduced to a very stylized world of neon lights, dark backrooms and people hanging around in silence (when they are not singing Karaoke). Gosling supposedly is a fight instructor of some sort, we see him hanging around a gym a lot. He has a brother who is absolute scum which he proves by raping and brutally murdering an underage prostitute. That doesn't go over well for him and he ends up being killed himself. Gosling, with the support of his devilish mother, now has to go out to get revenge for his murdered brother.
As you can tell from this plot summary, there's really not much going in terms of storytelling other than your typical revenge story. That doesn't have to be a bad thing, Drive was minimal on story too and that film was awesome. But Drive worked as a fascinating genre film that was fueled by a sense of urgency and quiet tension, it was as exciting as it was marvelous. Only God Forgives has a miserable lack of these qualities. We never really care for or even understand any of the characters, starting with Gosling himself; on the one hand he is not very outspoken (in fact, he has only 22 lines of dialogue throughout the entire picture) and on the other hand Gosling's performance is the bare minimum of what you can even call a performance. All we get is him staring blankly without so much but moving a facial muscle. We've seen that Gosling can act and that he's able to create something out of shallow source material but here he's scraping the bottom of the barrel.
But luckily there is a counterpart to him which would be the casting of Kristin Scott Thomas as his mother. She is a real queen bitch, loving every second of screen time in which she can play against type. Her role is the only standout of this film apart from a brutal fist fight which sees Gosling getting his face smashed in like Jared Leto in Fight Club. Unfortunately both those highlights are wasted, as director Winding Refn seems to have been more interested in the colorful sets and cinematography, never bothering about actually telling a compelling story or even giving us any insight into a fascinating subculture or fictional characters.
Ultimately that means there's nothing that ever redeems this pretentious and boring film, it's all style, no substance. It wants to be regarded as art but falls flat on its ass and reveals its true nature of being a crappy exploitation movie with an extra portion of snob.
No comments:
Post a Comment