Violence and Stares :Only God Forgives

"Wanna Fight?" 

Only God Forgives reunites Ryan Gosling with Drive director Nicholas Winding Refn and there is a lot of familiarity with the visuals and story flow. If you saw Drive you can expect a lot of the same story telling pace in this film. Very slow, to the point of getting annoying, then very interesting.

Visually from beginning to end the movie is beautiful, especially the color mix with interior shots in the clubs. Goslings character Julian owns and operates a Muay Thai club (Muay Thai is Thailand's style of kickboxing). The trailer led me to believe this was going to be a martial arts based drama or action flick that had me so excited for it I wrote about it before. While it did lack in the martial arts, there is still plenty of violence in this film mostly from one of the other characters in the film played by Vithaya Pansringarm who must have been some kind of Muay Thai icon by the way he moved in his fight scene with Gosling.

If you read a synopsis it sums up the story as Goslings character looking to get revenge for his brothers murder.  Sounds like your standard 'good guy' vs 'bad guy' revenge story right?  What you might no read is that Goslings character Julian and his family are drug dealing criminals, his brother gets killed for doing some pretty psychopathic stuff which made me wonder who exactly was the villain in this film?  Nothing is ruined for you, don't worry, his brothers murder sets the premise for the film so you will still take it from there.  Pansringarm plays who I guess would be the villain if you consider his character credited as Lt. Chang who is the law enforcement officer in that region of Thailand that applies his own version of justice.

It's something you'll have to see to figure out, again the violence in this film is very violent so it's not for the squeamish if you have kids or a significant other that is disturbed by scenes of violence or torture scenes.  After watching it I am still on the fence about it, I liked Drive, but this isn't Drive.  It is its own movie that you'll have to check out to decide if you like it or not.