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Only God Forgives (2013), R, 1.5 stars

Ryan Gosling ready to fight.
Sometimes, a director can get away with his vision which interferes with the fundamentals of the project. Nicolas Winding Refn, from Bronson and Drive fame, is back to direct Ryan Gosling again to see what the dark limelights and life is like in the streets of Bangkok. We have to explore each character's conscience but ultimately drags with no interest whatsoever in what happens to the characters in this insanely, dull movie.

Gosling plays Julian, an American outcast who has a boxing club but is actually running as a drug operation. He finds out that his brother is brutally murdered by Lieutenant Chang (Vithaya Pansingram) because Julian's brother, Billy, raped and killed an underage prostitute.

Julian finds this out and he and his gang visit one of the people who had something to do with his brother's death. I cannot tell you if he resolves the situation with this guy. Julian's mother, Crystal, (Kristen Scott Thomas) visits to identify the corpse and talks to Julian to resolve some issues by informing Julian to assassinate the people who had something to do with his death. He refuses for retribution.

Basically, Crystal seeks out to use her own method to kill Choi and Lieutenant Chang for she finds out that they were involved in the whole murder. This leads to a gunfight in a Thai restaurant with lots of bloody corpses and Gosling fighting Chang in a brutal fight. The result is he has a black eye for the rest of the movie.

Kristin Scott Thomas as Julian's mother.
This movie is just unethical and plain nonsense. I cannot see the reason why and how "Drive" fans will like this depressing experience seeing so much graphic violence presented with unintelligent fashion. "Drive" had so much bloody violence but with purpose and it was relevant to the context of the story.

Ryan Gosling creates a character that really is now a caricature of his characters from "Drive" and "The Place Beyond the Pines" that came out earlier this year. Kristin Scott Thomas is way over the top as this demanding mother who swears vengeance on the people who killed one of his sons. She yells and brags and what I could tell, creates a weird ego and accent. It looks like she is trying. The dialogue is so contrived, silly, and ponderous that it remains aloof to the whole movie and cannot make out the situation making us care less about what happens to the characters.

The only few positive aspects about this movie is the atmospheric production of Thailand with dim and pale imagery that creates some self-awareness on what happens around the streets. The camera work is pretty good, too. But, the story is so meticulously ugly that Refn created a movie that was from hell. I was incredibly disappointed by his effort from his previous great effort from a few years ago.

*1/2

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