Review of Only God Forgives (2013) by Youropinionman — 31 Oct 2013

I consider myself a very open-minded person, but this is truly a terrible film. It is not entertaining or interesting in any way. In other words it serves no purpose, neither as art nor entertainment nor even as titillating pornography, and it does not necessarily have any more aesthetic merit than 90 minutes of black screen would.

It is a depraved film but I do not fault it merely for its depravity, I fault it because the depravity is extremely boring. I thoroughly enjoyed Drive and consider it one of the best films of 2011, which leads me to the conclusion that Refn is a relatively talented artist who is so incredibly pretentious that his entire career except for one fluke (Drive) has been one long egregious waste of his own abilities.

It is a rare and fortunate occasion when he can suppress his own pretensions of genius and his obsession with making what he thinks are "grand philosophical statements" long enough to make a film that actually has some kind of humanity and/or entertainment value (Drive).

Do not ever make the mistake of watching this film. It is not bad in an entertaining way that you can laugh at or make some interesting pseudo-academic analysis of, it is bad in a boring way. I am a little bit annoyed that someone as pretentious as Refn exists on this Earth.

The reason I gave this film a 2 instead of a 0 is because of the technically proficient cinematography by Larry Smith.