Charleston City Paper, Cambridge Day, and Here and Sphere
‘Only God Forgives’: ‘Drive’ team gets bloody red in the grayest of gray areas
July 18, 2013
With “Only God Forgives” Nicolas Winding Refn and Ryan Gosling team up for their second bloody go-round after finding success and acclaim for their 2011 car chase noir “Drive.” The teaming of the pair is a good one – a director with a hyper-stylized eye and a penchant for flourishes of quick bloody violence that would make Sam Peckinpah nod in appreciation; and a laconic actor, enigmatic and bristling, a brooding baby-faced brute, if you will, capable of unspeakable savagery.
In “Drive,” the story was rooted with a true antihero who comes to the aid of the hapless family next door, a simple setup that played out in the darkest recesses of the black and white spectrum. Here, though, there’s not a true right and just corner. Those who seemingly mete out justice by disemboweling others later prove to be morally ambiguous and perhaps even the face of evil. Continue reading
Del Toro has always been an intricate craftsman. The signs were evident in his quirky first outing, “Cronos” and best showcased in his Spanish Civil War-era films “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “The Devil’s Backbone.” His ventures into larger, more mainstream projects such as “Mimic” never took flight or, like “Hellboy” and its sequel, never forged an audience the way less articulate hero fare such as “The Avengers” have – truly the audience’s loss. But here the Mexican-born auteur with a penchant for horror and sci-fi seems eager to show prospective converts that he belongs, and he takes his shot in a very big way. 
The surprise here is Steve Carell, who plays against his usual big-screen persona as a feckless nice guy and is more like his irritable jerkwater boss on the NBC series “The Office.” His Trent, a middle-aged divorcee, decides to bring his new girlfriend Pam (Toni Collette) down to his summer house on the shore of some idyllic and fictional Massachusetts beach town. (“The Way, Way Back” was filmed in Wareham, Onset and Marshfield.) In tow are Trent’s diva daughter (Zoe Levin) and Pam’s introverted son, Duncan (Liam James). “The Brady Bunch” this is not.
Sans rules and with limited resources, what would you do? Snatch and grab, help out or hole up doomsday-prepper style?
Pot humor and pop-up party guests such as Rihanna keep the slow-moving premise (Baruchel also hates Hill and is a bit of whining wet noodle to boot) alive, though there are nuggets of WTF humor that snap you out of the stupor, including Michael Cera (yup, the anemic, sweet wimp from “Juno”) doing blow and getting a rim job in the bathroom while sipping an effete cocktail he seems to relish more than the sex act. 
One major early steppingstone was the 2004 remake of George Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead,” which featured an eclectic cast (Ving Rhames and Sarah Polley) and zombies that could run at full tilt. Danny Boyle had done that bit before and better with “28 Days Later …” and there’s really no one who can out-shamble Romero in the walking dead genre he pretty much invented. But sure enough, in the maddening, flesh-ripping mayhem, Snyder had carved out his niche as a hyperactive visual stylist. 
The premise of a wonk working for a private intelligence firm to protect corporations and the like from social terrorists, unscrupulous competitors and till-fleecing insiders is intriguing and builds nicely at the onset. It’s just the mechanics and fruition that get the pink slip. 
Most people would envy such heavy choices, but this is the third (and perhaps final) episode of Richard Linklater’s “Before” series and another cheeky exercise in endless talk, philosophical what-ifs and passive self-indulgence, which isn’t bad, mind you, it’s just not a real thing for most people. 
If you’re wondering why the actor, who holds an obvious penchant for sci-fi, would jump in the water with a man on his last breath, the answer is likely his son. “After Earth” is not a Will Smith movie, but a Jaden Smith movie. The young thespian held his own with dad in the underrated and wholly affecting pull-yourself-up drama “The Pursuit of Happyness” and was effective in “The Karate Kid” reboot. But this, this is Jaden’s coming out party, a big-screen bar mitzvah for Papa Smith to declare to the world, “My son is an actor.”
For What it's Worth 