Warn Ryan: Review: Only God Forgives

Reviews — By UniSA student on July 20, 2013 7:48 PM

By VICTORIA MOORE

1/5

God may forgive the makers of this film, but anyone who watches it won’t have the same compassion.

If you are into confusingly bad symbolism and a movie with a questionably tenuous plot then Only God Forgives will be right up your alley. If you’re not into that sort of thing (which most of us aren’t) then steer clear.

Nicholas Winding Refn’s latest movie, Only God Forgives, makes his 2011 thriller Drive, also with Gosling, seem like a god-send.

Channeling Drive, this violent film about a man avenging his brother’s death in Bangkok, was booed at its debut at the Cannes Film Festival.

Audiences however, appear to be giving it the benefit of the doubt. After all, what’s a little bloodshed when Ryan Gosling is involved?

It turns out the violence isn’t the most offensive part – it is in fact the painfully slow storyline and dialogue.

Gosling plays Julian, the impassive and desperately dull protagonist of this film, who, with his messed up brother Billy, manages a Bangkok boxing club that serves as a front for a drug smuggling operation. When Billy is murdered after he rapes and kills an underage prostitute, Crystal (Kristin Scott Thomas) arrives to avenge her first-born son’s death.

What follows is a most tedious 90 minutes, as Gosling walks, slowly and painfully from place to place with the intention of killing the people behind Billy’s murder.

If that wasn’t bad enough, the perpetrator, Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm), breaks out into Thai karaoke after slicing peoples limbs off with his Samurai sword which materializes out of no-where.

Naturally, Chang and Julian have a show-down, the revenge cycle culminating in a very mediocre scene. It’s a shame Gosling didn’t get to do more here. Instead, we look at him as he looks somewhere else while being beaten to a pulp. And even his looks can’t save this film.

If you aren’t confused by that, then you should be, the movie seeming to centre around a whole lot of meaningful looks, none of which amount to anything.

Set in the red-light district of Bangkok, seemingly devoid of daytime, Winding Refn takes it a step further, the main colours of the film painting us a red, gold and black picture.

For the most part the gore of the film is tolerable, up until the point that Julian reaches into his dead mothers entrails. Was it a sexual fetish or symbolic of reaching for her womb? One simply doesn’t know and like most of the movie such ideas are skated over.

If Winding Refn was going for poetic, he has one thing right – creating a poem which makes absolutely no sense.

Tags: film review, only god forgives, ryan gosling