13 Disappointing Recent Films That Should've Been Great
7. Only God Forgives
What Was Expected
Another triumph from Nicholas Winding Refn, as he did a film similar to Drive with more of his masterful visuals.
What We Actually Got
Drive was great. Only God Forgives was not.
The latter is all about style and oozes it from every frame. Visually, it's a beautiful movie, but it's very much style over substance - and a particularly bad type of style-over-substance. It's skin-deep and shallow, but thinks its extremely deep and its obnoxious arrogance is likely to induce plenty of walkouts.
In other words, it's style pretending to be substance.
Apparently, endless instances of Ryan Gosling staring at his hands and people singing in karaoke bars are supposed to be deep, but they're not. There needs to be a plot to back up the film's amazing style, and since this film doesn't have a plot, it just doesn't work.
This is clearly supposed to have a thematic message, but due to the film's pretentiousness and its expectancy of the audience to work everything out from finding meaning is near impossible.
It isn't without its moments, but there's no denying the film's lack of characterization and compelling plot, no matter how many critics try to defend this film as a five-star, misunderstood masterpiece.