Photo Credit: Radius-TWC
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A lot has already been said by the few that have seen Only God Forgives after it premiered at Cannes this year. To say that it received a harsh reception is to say that Hurricane Sandy was slightly destructive. It is an insane movie of maddening lunacy. Yes, it’s that crazy. And yet, I can’t say that it’s bad.
The movie fails on the narrative level because there really isn’t much going on. A seedy kickboxing ring that serves as a front for drug smugglers in Bangkok is run by an American named Crystal (Kristin Scott Thomas) whose son Billy (Tom Burke) is murdered after he rapes and kills a prostitute. Her surviving son, Julian (Ryan Gosling), is unwilling to avenge the murder so Crystal arrives to seek retribution. What follows is a bizarre excitation between mother and son that borders on the Oedipal and devolves into sheer co-dependent nonsense.
The bad news for Ryan Gosling is that this semi-disaster of a movie will forever be attached to his name. But the truth is that Gosling has little to do in the film except react with mopey prettiness to whatever his mother has decided to do. The real star here is Scott Thomas, who plays a woman so crazed with bloodlust and conceit that she is little more than the walking embodiment of blind revenge. Scott Thomas’s performance is so extreme and so rigid (in a terrifying way) that she makes Voldemort looks positively decent.
An artistic experiment that fails despite its best intentions.
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