It’s hard to make a David Lynch mindfuck film--hell, even David Lynch has trouble with it (see Inland Empire and Lost Highway). Still there’s a certain class of directors who try to tackle the subgenre as if a right of passage, assembling a deliberately paced film filled with artful compositions and punctuated with the old ultraviolence.
Only God Forgives is billed as the “Drive” followup reteaming director Nicolas Winding Refn and star Ryan Gosling, although the film is more a vehicle for Vithaya Pansringarm, the Thai actor who serves the closest thing in the film to a hero and moral center. He plays a phantom of a police officer, the kind the metes out a biblical strain of street justice that has little need for jails or handcuffs.
“Drive” came close to being the defining film of the current generation, establishing a new visual style, a new sub genre of music, and anointing Ryan Gosling as the most interesting actor of the moment. But instead of being the next “Pulp Fiction”, it became a modern “Reservoir Dogs”--a great film who nevertheless couldn’t change the course of the mainstream. The eyes of the cinema world are on Refn to see if he can deliver a fully great film, and any collaboration with Gosling will attract a lot of attention.
Unfortunately “Only God Forgives” wallows too much in Refn’s worst qualities to be fully successful. It’s populated with unlikable leads, thin plots, and a self seriousness that overestimates the quality of the final product.