Biff bang boom, it’s Burl! Ha ha, I’m here to review another
picture for you – a particularly garish picture, all blood reds and aquarium
blue! It’s a picture from the famed Scandinavian stylist Nicolas Winding Refn,
who brought us Drive and Bronson and Pusher and other single-word productions, most of them pretty
violent! Only God Forgives is no
exception!
Ha ha, I expected it would be violent, but it was even more
so than I’d thought! It’s right up there with The Mutilator and other Special Makeup Effects productions like
that! It seems there’s a family of American drug dealers who’ve set up shop in
the neon section of Bangkok, using a boxing club as their cover! There’s Billy,
the oldest brother, Julian, the taciturn younger brother, and Mom, who holds
her cigarettes like she’s watched too many Joan Crawford pictures!
The story begins when Billy, who is apparently crazy,
murdering a teenage girl! An unprepossessing policeman, Chang, allows the
girl’s father to take his delight in Billy, which in this case means clubbing the
young psycho to a pulp with a table leg! Then Chang metes out a little more
rough justice on the father, who was also his daughter’s pimpsman! And then comes
Mom’s retribution for her son’s death, after which further bloody events take
place! Ha ha, it’s Chang who retains the upper hand and commits most of the
mayhem!
At one point, Julian, whom we assume to be a real
punch-artist, challenges droopy-dog Chang to a fight! Well, ha ha, the young roundeyes
lands not a single blow, and the elderly Thai puts such a punching on Julian,
ha ha, such a punching! Chang then doles out more of his signature punishment
(some of it quite welcome!), and by the time he’s done, there aren’t many
characters left, and those who remain are short a limb or two!
All of this is enacted with a rather hilarious air of
self-seriousness, but also a great deal of pictorial beauty! There was not much
ol’ Burl could hang his hat on as far as emotional engagement went, which was
clearly by design! Ryan Gosling, who plays Julian, could have stirred embers
with his facial expressions, and he speaks hardly a word through the whole
picture!
It’s a gaudy, sleazy, nasty and frequently gorgeous world the
young Refn has created, but one with about the half-life of good latte art!
It’s pure and unashamed genre pulp, which is what I liked about it, but it was
missing the energy one associates with the form, and that I didn’t like so
much! And the puffery was a bit too much! It almost fits into that category in
which I place movies like Enter the Void
and Holy Motors, a category I call Ha
Ha, How The Heck Did This Ever Get Made??? But it’s rather a thin broth
compared to those, so I’m going to give Only
God Forgives two and a half horrible pokings!
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