Silence!----Ryan Gosling as a cold blooded and silent killer out for revenge in Only God Forgives
Only God Forgives might be the worst film made by a group of talented people that I have ever seen. The film is so painfully hard to watch that I was tempted to walk out. However, I stuck through until the end and I think I temporarily died while doing so. Let me put it this way----think of the most boring and hardest to watch film you can see. Now---think of something that's 1000X more boring and 100000X harder to watch. You just thought of Only God Forgives. This is not merely a bad film but an excruciating one. This is the kind of film that is made for nobody. I can't honestly imagine anyone enjoying any second of this disaster.
The film stars Ryan Gosling as Julian...a drug pusher whose brother---a pedophile and complete sociopath is killed after beating up a teenage prostitute. It is then that his mother, Crystal (Kristin Scott Thomas) tells Julian to avenge his brother's death. Also...there is a lot of stuff about incest. It's not even implied, either. It is directly stated that both of Crystal's children had carnal relationships with her.
The film is written and directed by Nicolas Winding Refn...the guy who previously directed Gosling in the good but overrated Drive and did the amazing Bronson as well as the superior Pusher trilogy. Here...he proves that even great directors have bad days. I didn't love Drive liked I loved the other four films I've seen of his (I amazingly have yet to see Valhalla Rising) but at least that was cool. This film is just disgusting. It was so disgusting in fact that I literally had to take a shower the second I got home from seeing it. However, I wouldn't have minded the ickiness of it all had it been contextual but it's not. Every scene is just another random scene without context for something brutal to happen. In fact..there are really no two scenes that actually fit together.
The performances (if you can even call them that) are awful. Gosling barely utters a word and still manages to make Julian the dumbest character in film history while Thomas is phoning it in like never before. It's not like these aren't two great actors, either. Both Gosling and Thomas have been fantastic in far better films. Here, however, they're obviously just bored. The direction by Refn is awful...lending unnecessary shots of gratuitous torture which---once again---would have been fine had it been contextual. Refn's script is also quite lame...giving the actors nothing to work with except to stare down long hallways and get killed.
I feel like I can't end this review, however, without talking about a torture scene that takes place in a karaoke bar. If you still want to see this film after having read this review...I will just say it involves the removing of two essential body parts. This scene is Only God Forgives in a nutshell...a film that is disgusting and impossible to watch without context and a pretentious film that thinks it's much cooler than it is.
(0 out of 5 Stars, The film is rated R for strong bloody violence including grisly images, sexual content and language)
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