"Only God Forgives" is the ultimate example that the most personal and uncompromising work of a filmmaker is not always his best. Unlike most people have been saying, this film shares many common traits with Refn's most famous work "Drive": a stylized plot to allow complete focus on the aesthetics and atmosphere, characters who stay quiet and let the images talk instead, emphasis on the city and its urban landscapes, a silent hero with an ambiguous ethical code, twisted violence used as some kind of artistic fetish, men seeking for redemption as they keep fighting forces that are far greater than themselves. So why didn't the formula work this time?
"Only God Forgives" sees Refn rowing against the current at all costs and dropping all intent to please his audience, as if he was asked to prove his artistic integrity after having achieved mainstream success. I guess people didn't like that Ryan Gosling this time impersonates a pathetic loser with rotten feelings, continuously manipulated by his deranged and vengeful mother. Honestly, that was actually the only interesting thing I could find in the whole movie. Despite Gosling's bloated performance, his character brings with him the existentialist and introspective nature of this film. It's the key to decipher all symbols and visual nonsense. His mother Crystal is perfectly portrayed by Kristin Scott Thomas, but her character ends up being overly stylized and cartoonish, a little more than a swearing machine with boobs. Crystal's opponent Chang is a cruel executioner that resembles the God from the Old Testament, able to forgive those who violate his principles but not without proper punishment. He connects well with the mystical, alienating atmosphere that permeates the film, but I couldn't stop laughing every time he was swirling his machete around.
It felt just like one more pretentious, self-indulgent film that will definitely stay in my mind for decades, but that due to the naive and careless writing failed to communicate anything more than formal beauty.
So, I saw Only God Forgives and it was really disappointing. Now, I didn't have huge expectations going into it in the first place, and it's not like there were no redeeming qualities to this movie whatsoever, and it's not like there were no redeeming qualities to this movie whatsoever,but it is definitely not something that I would recommend.
Now, there are plenty of great movies out there that have minimal action scenes and slow pacing, but when it works it's usually because the audience members have something to digest when they're watching it. In Only God Forgives the story is not only ridiculously simple but kind of irrelevant. The movie obviously knows when it's most marketable scenes are, because those scenes were in the trailer. When people get excited by all those short clips in a trailer, they're mostly excited by the promise that those scenes will actually be held together by something.they're mostly excited by the promise that those scenes will actually be held together by something.
Watching two characters fighting is not nearly as entertaining as watching two characters you actually understand and care about, fighting. During many of the scenes in this movie I found myself thinking that they would be better scenes if they were simply in a different movie. One with, maybe, some context! Long, drawn-out scenes of silent actors' faces might be compelling if there was some glue holding them together. But I felt like there was no story progressing in between at all. It was all icing and no cake. The film was visually interesting, despite it being visually repetitive. But most of it is what I would like to call pretentious.
Review by MaxBlockedParent2023-12-16T04:39:26Z— updated 2023-12-20T02:23:42Z
This movie was actually so weird and borderline bad I had to make a review for it. While there are some genuinely good scenes (especially towards the end), most of it was just way too slow. I understand wanting to make it seem dramatic but the slow paced scenes are only good and worthwhile when it is backed up by normal paced scenes. For example, chocolate is good--but you only know it's good when you haven't had a lot of it. If you ate a gallon of chocolate then you would most likely feel sick and not like it. Or water. If you had a bunch of water you would be sick of it, but if you had water after the gallon of chocolate the water would feel like it was blessed from the heavens. The few scenes that were normally paced and not a character staring off into the distance for 30 seconds felt like water from the heavens.
Aside from the slow pacing of it the violence was good. It seemed like they put enough of the budget into making the violence seem realistic which I could appreciate. I also find the relationship between [Julian and Mai to be weird] but maybe I just don't understand the movie that well. And finally, the acting was good (I suppose). It wasn't horrible but it's not something super memorable.