When Ryan Gosling and Nicolas Winding Refn got together for Drive, they created one of the most stylish, visually striking, memorably violent and morally empty films of the year. It may have annoyed and irritated in equal measure but by golly it was arresting stuff. Now they have reunited for another dark look into Refn’s view of humanity and come up with one of the most pretentious, self-conscious and mannered films of this year.
For its entire 90 minutes Refn plunges us into his vision of hell Bangkok, with its red neon lights, obsession with violence and revenge. He thinks he is making an epic, Jacobean, blood-drenched look at fate and revenge, but trust me, it’s as morally shallow as Drive was, but without the stylish visuals and set-pieces to make up for it. It’s 90 minutes of blood-letting and violence about people who are complete strangers in a land you’d rather not visit.
In Drive Gosling was portrayed as the new king of cool, a Steve McQueen-type character who looks great, says little and is essentially the man with no name. Here his repeat performance the mumbling, the silences, the irrational attacks on old men in bars is starting to wear as thin as his script. According to IMDB he has 22 lines of dialogue. I’m surprised it’s as many as that.
He plays Julian, an American running a boxing club in Bangkok as a front for a drugs ring. His psychopath brother rapes and kills a 14-year-old girl, and is killed by the girl’s father. These events put in motion a plot that pits Julian against Chang, a former policeman who is persuaded to come out of retirement and deal with the crimes with his special sword.
Julian’s mother Crystal (Scott Thomas) turns up wanting revenge for her first-born son and tries to persuade Julian to take action. He in turn tries to resist, but when Crystal also tries to work a drug deal into the equation it can have only one outcome.
It’s the sort of film that incites many threads on IMDB along the lines of is Chang God?’, what’s the deal with Gosling’s hands’ and is his relationship with his mother Oedipal?’. The trouble with the film is it sets up these questions and answers them with depressingly repetitive bursts of violence rather than a coherent script.
Julian is indeed obsessed with his hands, even having them tied down while watching his girlfriend masturbate, but presumably this obsession is because he is going to get his hands cut off for his drugs crimes. So what?
Also his relationship with his mother is never explained she is awful to him and his girlfriend, yet he quietly sits there and takes it.
It’s all far too pretentious to take seriously, and with a visual style that basically consists of red neon in bars, utterly gloomy. Yes, it’s hell, we get it again the reaction is basically so what.
Films seem to come in threes these days, one can only hope the efforts of Refn and Gosling remains at two.
Overall verdict: Pretentious, pseudo-epic claptrap that will irritate even the most ardent of Gosling fans.
Reviewer: Mike Martin