Only God Forgives

If you enjoyed Drive but wished it could have had swords instead of cars, all of your weirdly specific, 11-year-old-boy dreams will come true in Only God Forgives. The second collaboration between Nicolas Winding Refn and Ryan Gosling finds the duo moving from the streets of L.A. to Bangkok, and working in a similar, if slightly more crimson shade of neon-bathed stylized action, with Refn’s coolly detached violence again finding its perfect analog in Gosling’s inscrutable face. Gosling—a Thai boxing time bomb who’s been ticking ever since he was planted in his mafia don mother’s womb—glumly watches and participates in various scenes of brutality, looking never so bored as when he’s dragging a man down a hallway by his mouth. He's so unaffected by it all, he can barely mumble an indifferent “Wanna fight?” by trailer's end. And then they do wanna fight, and so that’s another thing Ryan Gosling’s gotta do today.

 
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