ONLY GOD FORGIVES (2013)

This OTT followup to DRIVE/’11 sees star Ryan Gosling and writer/director Nicolas Winding Refn ‘jump the shark’ past Art, past Arty (where DRIVE crashed*), even past Artsy; all the way to Artsy Fartsy.  It turns out to be a natural fit.  In a neon-lit Thailand, Private Club KickBoxing entrepreneur Gosling seeks revenge for a violent brother who’s massacred a display window’s worth of sex workers, their pimp & a street hooker, only to be taken down by a blade-bearing martial arts police detective.  Tasked by Mom Kristin Scott Thomas, is Gosling up to the challenge?  Laid out as a series of over-stylized tableaux vivants glowing in neon red, it’s fashionable, unfollowable, and oddly entertaining.  Climaxing in a big, hit your head against the wall fight (with martial arts dick playing WALL), while the actual climax comes earlier, when that nasty brother, caught by said martial arts dick, is pinned to a chair with  stabs thru his arms & thighs, before catching it thru his eyes and receiving a coup de grace thru the ear.  Yikes!  A torture session that threatens to spill off the screen before Refn shows mercy on us by muting the detective’s Karaoke celebration.  (Be warned, vocals saved for the final credits.)  Loony enough to be borderline endearing, GOD reverses DRIVE’s diminishing returns by reveling in more than enough self-referential/self-satisfied/self-indulgent rot to let Gosling display 50 shades of passivity.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Refn dedicates the film to sadistic Chilean auteur Alejandro Jodorowsky, but ought to have given ‘props’ to Fred Astaire & Vincente Minnelli, specifically ‘The Girl Hunt’ Ballet that tops THE BAND WAGON/’53. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/11/the-band-wagon-1953.html  OR: *DRIVE:  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/08/drive-2011.html