After Drive comes the slow motion, mangled wreck that is Only God Forgives.
In the J.G. Ballard novel (and David Cronenberg movie adaptation) Crash, a group of nihilistic thrill seekers stage automobile accidents for twisted kicks and you can’t help wonder if director Nicholas Winding Refn is operating in a similar way here. Drive’s critical and commercial acclaim put him on Hollywood’s Formula 1 starting grid; here, he’s very deliberately tried to sabotage his race to spin out in a glorious fireball. And while some see great beauty in a spectacular crash n’ burn – and admire the foolish wilfulness that caused it – the end result is still a write-off.
Let’s leave the metaphors be for now, since Winding Refn has packed his own film with enough portentousness for an entire career, let alone one film. The irony is, it’s all in the service of a revenge plot that’s simple to the point of stupid – tit-for-tat Bangkok killings sparked by a loose cannon Yank Billy (Brit Tom Burke) senselessly raping and murdering a teenage prostitute, then in turn being slain by the girl’s father, with some help from impassive, deadly cop Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm).
Billy and his brother Julian (Gosling) have been running a boxing club that’s actually a front for a drugs operation. And when their Jersey Shore-esque mother Crystal (Scott Thomas) arrives seeking vengeance, it’s up to Julian to deliver. “It’s a little more complicated than that,” Julian mumbles, revealing Billy’s horrific behaviour. “I’m sure he had his reasons,” his mother spits back. And that, ladies and gents, is what passes for behavioural insight in Only God Forgives. There’s no time for that when you have endless subterranean neon-red corridors to drift along, minutes to focus on Gosling clenching and unclenching his fists, and multiple bodies to slice and dice.
Most of the gruesome set-pieces come courtesy of Chang, whose trademark, other than random bursts of karaoke pop, is to produce a Thai dha (sword) seemingly from nowhere and get busy lopping limbs like a chef casually dicing lemongrass. It’s brutal, graphic stuff, particularly one scene that uses needles even more adventurously than the “kiri kiri kiri” sadist in Takashi Miike’s Audition.
The strange thing is, unlike Audition and almost every other torture movie, Only God Forgives genuinely seems anaesthetized by its own violence. It may be drenched in blood, but it’s stripped of any emotion. Beyond the violence, the characters behave like automatons. Gosling is almost a parody of his soulful, stoic silent types, ready-made to become his next .gif (OMG! OGF!). The mere handful of lines he utters in the film makes his taciturn Drive anti-hero seem scripted by Aaron Sorkin. Sometimes, less is less.
Pansingarm’s Change has the relentless plodding step of Michael Myers but even less personality. Even Scott Thomas, vamping it up with one-liners more outrageous than her peroxide/leopard print combo, is barely a recognizable human being; just a collection of OTT mannerisms and quotes designed to shock. It’s all a bit ‘once more, without feeling’. Dha, dha, dha…
OK, so clearly Winding Refn isn’t aiming for an emotionally rich, psychologically complex tale. It’s a mood piece, where Larry Smith’s luminous imagery, all crimson and gold, latticed shadows and fairy lights, and Cliff Martinez’s superb rumbling, echo-drenched percussion do much of the heavy lifting. Entire auteur careers have been founded on less.
But the film’s failings become more evident if you consider an earlier Winding Refn effort, 2009’s Valhalla Rising, with Mads Mikkelsen’s silent but deadly Norse killer One Eye unleashed in an oppressive, godless world. Valhalla is flawed, but its existential, ultraviolent desperation packs the genuine dread entirely lacking here. In Winding Refn’s determination to strip back everything but the wallpaper aesthetic – quite literally at times, with the repeated black-and-white, jagged Escher-liker surfaces – and the savagery, he’s kept his one eye on the hole not the doughnut, leaving a gorgeous void.
Speaking of voids and entering them, the film’s dedications to filmmakers Alejandro Jodorowsky and Gaspar Noé, at least offer a clue Winding Refn’s gambit. These two directors push more buttons than a lift operator (Jodorowsky far more successfully), and reveal Only God Forgives, like Noé’s phoney Irreversible, as the exercise in provocation it is. Yet the worst insult for a provocateur is that they’re boring. Against all odds, Only God Forgives, starring the hottest A-list actor in the world in a violent underworld revenge saga, is unforgivably dull.
The Verdict
A few years back came Nicolas Cage’s so-so Thai action movie Bangkok Dangerous. The only risky thing about Only God Forgives is Winding Refn’s lack of regard for a Hollywood career, luxuriating in his own gruesome pretentiousness. Call it Bangkok Ponderous.
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See the published article on IGN – ‘Car Crash’