Drive was pretty amazing, wasn’t it? The soundtrack, the brimming tension, Ryan Gosling’s searingly charismatic lead performance… so you can forgive us (no pun intended) for expecting something special for Gosling’s re-teaming with his Drive director, Nicolas Winding Refn.
Not only does the pair’s second time working together fail to scale the lofty heights as their first effort, it actually manages to be one of the worst films of the year. We know! Yes, we loved Drive too. No, there isn’t even really any fighting despite the trailer.
To best sum it up, Only God Forgives is a bit like getting stuck in a lift with a really shit poet on coke. Rambling, pretentious and sometimes needlessly violent, it’s not the film the trailers promised and features some of the least engaging characters committed to film in recent memory.
I know what you’re thinking… maybe our expectations were too high after the brilliance of Drive. They were – that’s what a brilliant film does. A film that will be studied in film schools for decades to come. That doesn’t let ‘Forgives’ off the hook, though, not by a long stretch…
Issues are long and plentiful, but let’s have a look at the plot, which is basically an NC-17 version of a Jean Claude Van Damme movie from the early 90s… that isn’t Timecop.
Gosling and his brother run a Thai-Boxing gym in Bangkok as a cover to smuggle drugs and whatnot. But the brother is not one of those cuddly drug dealers at all, and after raping and killing a young prostitute is promptly beaten to death by her father – having essentially been forced to by a mysterious karaoke singing/sword-wielding detective. Gosling realises avenging his death probably isn’t the wisest idea as he was a bit of a scumbag; but when his overbearing and inherently creepy Mother (Kristin Scott Thomas) arrives in the Far East, he has to do something. Or she’ll ground him.
What follows is basically a series of moody scenes; elongated takes of Gosling looking perturbed; a lot of close-ups of his Ma either smoking or generally looking all shiny and vixen-like. While smoking, obviously.
Refn has apparently branded himself a pornographer of sorts, which would explain the extremely graphic violence. What he doesn’t do is back up any of that violence with anything resembling coherence and the resulting film is a crass, indulgent mess.
Ryan Gosling. You’re better than this. You were also better than Gangster Squad but we let that one slide. This we just can’t…
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