Only God Forgives

Well, this weeks cinema outing is so impressionable that it even encouraged me to coin the adjective 'Ryan Gosling', meaning a bloated pseudo-artistic pretentious movie. I didn't think it was possible at the time but this movie is so much worse than 'the place beyond the pines'. The films stars Ryan Gosling as Julian,  a man exiled in bankok, running a boxing club as a front for his families drug running business . Kristen Scott Thomas stars as his mother, who comes to collect Julians brothers body, and who asks him to get revenge.

Overall this film is really really boring, at only an hour and a half it feels way too long, and i found myself almost falling asleep only to be woken from my slumber by the metallic whip of a limb being cut off. The film is a complete paradox in that is manages to be underscripted and overscripted simultaneously, on one hand there is barely dialogue, and not enough story to fill a feature picture, the spaces in between the dialogue is filled with shots of good

looking people staring at doors. Then on the other hand, the film is overscripted, in that all the dialogue is so ponderous and 'artsy' and none of it actually seems genuine or real.

The film is neither successfully nor poorly acted, its simply non-acted, neither of the leads really sell their characters, and the lack of dialogue doesn't help this. The film is also really poorly lit, with an over use of red lights, clearly intended to make the film 'artistic' The film has little or no emotion, an presents characters which it is unclear if the audience is supposed to care about or not, this and the gratuitous use of violence makes for a dull ride. The film goes way too far with the violence, with it being overused and bluntly used with no depth or subtlety, and feels needless.

Overall 'Only God Forgives' is a bad film, and one which is really really boring with a load of gratuitous violence, it is a film which pretends to be 'artistic' and which ends up being bloated, self important and with a ludicrously thin script, an exercise in masturbatory film-making. On the plus side i guess Ryan Gosling does look cute, even bathed in red light. Rating: C-

Billy: Time to meet the devil.