Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive follow-up boasts plenty of lurid ultraviolence but precious little originality
Well, I thought, after Only God Forgives, that makes two movies in a row Nicolas Winding Refn has got through without disembowelling a single person. Well done. Such restraint. And yet … Elsewhere, two men have a total of three arms subtracted by sword. A raped and murdered Thai prostitute is glimpsed in a vast lake of blood, and soon thereafter her killer is seen horribly mutilated, maimed, murdered and enucleated, the latter being pretty much my personal final frontier in the realm of movie ultraviolence (you can eat my brains and stew my flesh all the live-long day, but for pity's sake leave my eyeballs alone). And then it happens again, on screen this time, to a man whose all four limbs have been skewered to his chair with steel chopsticks.
Somewhere in here is a story that Refn can hardly be bothered to tell: the psychotic brother of Bangkok-dwelling American Julian (Ryan Gosling) murders a girl, is murdered for it in his turn by the girl's father, who is acting reluctantly under the aegis of a karaoke-loving samurai-cop (Vithaya Pansringarm), an angel of vengeance figure who then subtracts arm number one from the father as punishment for pimping out his late daughter. Julian's vile crime-lord mother (Kristin Scott Thomas) arrives seeking vengeance, arrayed in all the lurid vestments of the Real Housewives Of Miami Vice, and berates Julian endlessly on matters of cock size and spinelessness. Here, the movie briefly rouses itself from its soporific torpor – picture Penelope Keith locked inside Caligula – but thereafter falls back like a predictable recidivist into the sin of tedium, which I cannot forgive; never mind what God thinks.
Those who encountered Refn through his hyper-stylised LA thriller Drive might bridle at Only God Forgives, whose fugue-state narrative style, amnesiac and futureless, has more in common with Valhalla Rising, the hallucinatory but only intermittently engaging Viking movie he made before Drive (though parts of it were magnificent, including Gary Lewis's Scottish pagan talking of the barbaric Christians: "They eat their own god; eat his flesh, drink his blood. Abominable!"). And Only God Forgives is dedicated to Argentinian director Alejandro Jodorowsky, whose 1970 acid-western-cum-vision-quest El Topo offered the direct inspiration for Valhalla Rising.
The result is akin to Gaspar Noé's simultaneously brilliant and moronic Enter The Void or Harmony Korine's candy-coloured Spring Breakers, filtered through way-out-easterns like Pollack and Schrader's The Yakuza or Terence Young's Red Sun. Which may be the problem with Refn: I feel the ghosts of other movies – his influences, his inspirations – crowding in on his own work, suffocating him, and somehow leaving less of him on screen. Reported by guardian.co.uk 3 hours ago.
Well, I thought, after Only God Forgives, that makes two movies in a row Nicolas Winding Refn has got through without disembowelling a single person. Well done. Such restraint. And yet … Elsewhere, two men have a total of three arms subtracted by sword. A raped and murdered Thai prostitute is glimpsed in a vast lake of blood, and soon thereafter her killer is seen horribly mutilated, maimed, murdered and enucleated, the latter being pretty much my personal final frontier in the realm of movie ultraviolence (you can eat my brains and stew my flesh all the live-long day, but for pity's sake leave my eyeballs alone). And then it happens again, on screen this time, to a man whose all four limbs have been skewered to his chair with steel chopsticks.
Somewhere in here is a story that Refn can hardly be bothered to tell: the psychotic brother of Bangkok-dwelling American Julian (Ryan Gosling) murders a girl, is murdered for it in his turn by the girl's father, who is acting reluctantly under the aegis of a karaoke-loving samurai-cop (Vithaya Pansringarm), an angel of vengeance figure who then subtracts arm number one from the father as punishment for pimping out his late daughter. Julian's vile crime-lord mother (Kristin Scott Thomas) arrives seeking vengeance, arrayed in all the lurid vestments of the Real Housewives Of Miami Vice, and berates Julian endlessly on matters of cock size and spinelessness. Here, the movie briefly rouses itself from its soporific torpor – picture Penelope Keith locked inside Caligula – but thereafter falls back like a predictable recidivist into the sin of tedium, which I cannot forgive; never mind what God thinks.
Those who encountered Refn through his hyper-stylised LA thriller Drive might bridle at Only God Forgives, whose fugue-state narrative style, amnesiac and futureless, has more in common with Valhalla Rising, the hallucinatory but only intermittently engaging Viking movie he made before Drive (though parts of it were magnificent, including Gary Lewis's Scottish pagan talking of the barbaric Christians: "They eat their own god; eat his flesh, drink his blood. Abominable!"). And Only God Forgives is dedicated to Argentinian director Alejandro Jodorowsky, whose 1970 acid-western-cum-vision-quest El Topo offered the direct inspiration for Valhalla Rising.
The result is akin to Gaspar Noé's simultaneously brilliant and moronic Enter The Void or Harmony Korine's candy-coloured Spring Breakers, filtered through way-out-easterns like Pollack and Schrader's The Yakuza or Terence Young's Red Sun. Which may be the problem with Refn: I feel the ghosts of other movies – his influences, his inspirations – crowding in on his own work, suffocating him, and somehow leaving less of him on screen. Reported by guardian.co.uk 3 hours ago.