Only God Forgives

I'm a movie critic. And not even a professional one. I do this because I like movies and have seen a lot of them. If you asked me to make a movie, I'd probably make a pretty shitty one. Knowing what goes into a good movie does not qualify me to make my own, just as knowing what goes into a delicious meal does not enable me to cook one. There's a critic for just about everything. I know art when I see it, though I can't always say what's significant about it and whether or not it has any value. Or, for that matter, who it has value to.

This is a review for Only God Forgives. Mark and I have been looking forward to this one pretty much since it was announced. It is Nicolas Winding Refn's first film following Drive, and also happens to star Ryan Gosling. It is our consensus that Drive was pretty damn good, so we had high expectations going into this one.

I'm going to make this review short and sweet, because the more I think about this movie, the more frustrated I get. Take a good look at that poster up there. Get a feel for the colors. It's trippy, it's different, it's cool. Now watch this trailer for the movie:

Pretty badass. More humorless, ass-kicking Gosling. That's a plus. An intense and formidable bad guy. Check. A stylish and exotic backdrop. Got it. But before you find yourself dishing out money at the box office, let me just say that whatever movie you put together in your mind after looking at that poster and watching that trailer...it's better than Only God Forgives. The poster tells you everything you need to know about the style; every visual is draped in dark neon colors. And Ryan Gosling is essentially his character from Drive; he just kind of stands there until it's time to beat something to death.

The unfortunate truth, however, is that he does very little death beating this time around. After his psycho brother does some psycho things for some psycho reasons that are never revealed, and gets himself killed, Gosling's character Julian is tasked by his mother to find and eliminate his killer. As you can imagine, things pretty much go straight downhill from there.

When going into a film directed by Refn, it is best to leave your expectations at the ticket booth. His films seem to dance on the border between fantasy and reality, structured storytelling and lucid stream of consciousness; Bronson and Drive are relatively straightforward, albeit very odd, but Valhalla Rising just baffles me. And it's with the latter that I would pair Only God Forgives. The pacing of this movie is all over the place; we'll get a chase scene through the dark, neon streets of Bangkok followed by six minutes of Gosling staring at a stripper and sort of touching himself. We are never really told who is who, or why things are happening. I inadvertently found myself pretending that Gosling's Julian was the same character from Drive, in the events following his flee from Los Angeles. At least that way I felt compelled to see his story through to the end.

If this movie is a puzzle to be sorted and pieced together before the big beautiful picture can be taken in, then I think maybe some of the pieces are upside down, and maybe others have been chewed on by the dog. My point is, I just can't seem to wrap my mind around what this film is about and what it's telling me.

That bit I wrote in the beginning about art and criticism is my disclaimer. Everyone has their breaking point when it comes to tolerating and even appreciating artistic film-making. Mark and I have walked this line in the past, on movies like Holy Motors and Brick. For me, Only God Forgives was just too far out there. Every film is a work of art. But the thing about art is that it rarely has mass appeal, and it usually baffles people. I can't say this film is a masterpiece, and I can't say it's shit. Maybe that's for other critics and filmmakers to decide. But for the (possibly above) average moviegoer, such as myself, it was not very enjoyable.

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Feel free to comment with your interpretation of the film, or just what you thought of it. Unfortunately, not being in wide release, I doubt many people are going to see this one until it comes out on Netflix or something. At any rate, I would love to know if anyone else got more out of it than I did.