Image of Ryan Gosling via Wild Bunch
By Angela Espinoza, Arts Editor
1/5
There aren’t many nice ways to say a film is, “the worst film I have seen in a long time.” What makes this realization particularly painful though is that this film happens to be another team-up between director Nicolas Winding Refn and dreamboat Ryan Gosling, who worked together on 2011’s, Drive.
Where Drive was suspenseful, superbly acted, beautiful to look at, and fantastic to listen to, Only God Forgives only succeed in the cinematography category.
Gosling plays Julian, one half of a brother-run Taiwanese drug ring, and manages to piss off the wrong karaoke-singing crooked cop (Vithaya Pansringarm), all while Gosling’s mother (Kristin Scott Thomas) visits for her elder son’s funeral. So imagine that with occasional gruesome violence, horribly-stupid dialogue, and several instances of cutaways to karaoke singing, and you literally have Only God Forgives.
Where Drive was mysterious and quiet, Only God Forgives simply chooses to say nothing. Where Gosling was a charming bad boy in Drive, here he regularly visits a prostitute (whom he attacks at one point) and gets his ass kicked by an old Asian man. The violence in Drive was definitely gruesome, but at no point did it get unbelievably ridiculous, especially in context, which Only God Forgives has none.
Only God Forgives had to have been a quick cash-in on Drive’s success, because never otherwise would I think such a horrible Goddamned movie could come from the collaboration of Refn and Gosling.
