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    Only God Forgives

    Reviewed by
    adamwatchesmovies@

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    “Only God Forgives” looks terrific; the use of colour is nothing short of brilliant and the cinematography jumps out as particularly strong as well. Too bad the movie as a whole is plain ugly and the entirety of its characters completely unlikeable. When Billy (Tom Burke) is discovered by a Bangkok police officer after having raped and murdered a 16-year-old girl, he finds the girl’s father and lets the man (Kovit Wattanakul) beat the murderer to death. When she hears the news, Billy’s mother (Kristin Scott Thomas) is outraged and demands revenge. She asks her second-born son, Julian (Ryan Gosling) to grant her satisfaction in an increasing spiral of violence.

    When I say the characters in this movie are totally unlikeable, I meant it literally. I don’t mean in the way that some people would call an anti-hero unlikeable because he or she doesn’t obey the rules. I don’t use the term in the way a flawed character might be considered unlikeable because he or she needs to show improvement and growth throughout the film. I mean these are terrible people that you want to see boiled alive in oil, eaten slowly by a pack of wild dogs or murdered with a sandblaster. The character who drives the action of the film, Billy, is a pedophile, a rapist, a violent misogynist and a drug dealer. When this guy was killed, I was sorry only in the sense that I didn’t get to do see it on-screen. When his mother comes into play, you hate her even more. When Julian informs her that “Billy raped and killed a 16-year-old girl” and that’s why someone figured he was no longer fit to live, her answer is “I’m sure he had his reasons”. Wow. What I wouldn’t give to splice this movie with that final scene from “Hellraiser”, so I could see these characters get torn apart with Pinhead’s hook-chains. If that wasn’t bad enough, she’s a domineering, verbally abusive racist who might have had incestuous relationships with her children (at least one of them) Julian isn’t much better either. I think the objective of the film is to have him as a sort of neutral character, who is torn between obeying his mother and thinking that Billy got what he deserved, but it doesn’t work. To think that he is a likeable character you would have to ignore the fact that he is spineless block of wood with basically no personality, has a tendency to assault strangers for no reason and that he commits several murders himself throughout the film. I’m not talking about bad people exclusively either, I’m talking about police officers who were just doing their jobs that got in his way. I found his character even more unlikeable when towards the end of the film he shows conflict over killing a little girl. Oh I see, it’s bad to kill children but if you’re killing their fathers, their brothers, their mothers or their nannies it doesn’t bother you eh? Give me a break. This character is not likeable and no bullshit ending (and this movie has a bullshit ending) can convince us otherwise.

    If you stretched yourself, you might be able to like one of two secondary characters in the film. One is the prostitute that Julian frequents, who at least has the sense to call the mother out for the bitch that she is. The other is the cop responsible for getting Billy killed. Even then I couldn’t get behind this character. Yeah he’s a supercop who gets the job done in an ugly world, but he also tortures several people so brutally that you want to disconnect yourself from him (mostly because he treats it as standard police procedure, not as a personal vendetta) He also seems to really pick and choose at random who deserves to be punished, with some people who have suffered a lot getting punished even further by his hand, and others who deserve a severe punishment by any country’s standards getting off not necessarily easy, but not in a way that’s equal to the other people he dispenses justice towards.

    In the movie’s defence, it’s got a lot of style, some great cinematography and an excellent use of colour. I also found the acting to be pretty good and the special effects to be convincing as well. For an hour and a half of your time though, this really doesn’t offer much. It’s filled with confusing dream sequences and ambiguous moments of morality, awful characters you couldn’t care less for and a story that in the end doesn’t really mean anything. It wasn’t an unpleasant experience for the most part because the movie looks good, but it just left me feeling dirty and disappointed. (On Dvd, July 5, 2014)

    4
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    adamwatchesmovies@  24.11.2014 age: 26-35 2,867 reviews

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