15 Movies That Thought They Were Smart But Totally Weren't

After making his best film with Drive, Nicolas Winding Refn misfired with this next film, a revenge thriller about a drug smuggler avenging his brother, which also touches on a variety of themes regarding redemption, religion and violence.

Only God Forgives is one of the most visually exquisite films of recent times and you can't fault Refn for ambition, but on the whole none of the many themes and ideas in Only God Forgives really connect at all. The whole film is too abstract, meandering and disconnected to be a moving or thought-provoking experience.

So, why did Drive work so well when it used the same, minimalist style? The reason for this was that Drive focused on creating a mood, not on exploring all the complicated things that Only God Forgives does.

With such an abstract style, conveying loads of complicated messages was always going to be difficult and Drive, like many of the best movies, just kept things simple. As a result, it was a deeply moving experience as well as a stylistically stimulating one.

In contrast, Only God Forgives makes things far too complicated and is positively drowning in its own pretensions, symbolism and motifs; in fact, one of the characters is literally meant to be God. This character also keeps singing in a karaoke bar, which makes about as much sense as the rest of this movie does (i.e. none whatsoever).