Better movie than Drive. More compelling plot

It was interesting in that the protagonist is the bad guy and the antagonist is the good guy. Even though Goose is just trying to do right by his family, his family are all scumbags and the Thai cop is the righteous one.
It's not that mindblowing of a concept but I've rarely seen it done before.

dude it's a metaphor for dicks lmao

what plot? refn jumped the gun with this, it was unwatchable

It's a mess. They ran out of money and had to slap something together. This is kino, though.

Do you want me to summarize the plot? The brother of Gosling's character was unhinged and killed a prostitute, the father of the prostitute along with a corrupt police chief brutally murdered the brother. The mother of Gosling's character arrives in Thailand and orders a hit out on the father and the police chief, scolding Gosling for not killing them already. The father of the prostitute is murdered, the assassination of the police chief fails. The police chief retaliates by killing and torturing several of their associates, forcing them to confess and working his way back through confessions. Meanwhile Ryan Gosling is in love with a prostitute. He has a strange sexual relationship with her where he only fingers her and watches her masturbate, implying a strange insecurity about sex. They have dinner with the mother, the mother implies that she has a strange, incestuous relationship with her children. Ryan Gosling tracks down the police chief and asks him to box, Ryan can't fight and loses badly, the mother and the prostitute watch as he loses. The mother talks to Gosling, she implies that she asked Ryan to "protect her from his father" a long time ago, she tells Ryan to kill the police chief and he agrees. Ryan breaks into the chief's home with another hired gun and they kill several people, the other hired gun is about to kill a child and Ryan shoots him. The police chief tracks down the mother, the mother makes a statement implying Ryan killed his own father, this ties up the backstory, showing that the mother manipulated her sons to kill their own father, likely so that she could take over their drug dealing operations, she manipulated her children through sex and blackmail to be the arms of her drug operation. The police chief kills the mother. Then the police chief tracks down Ryan. Before the police chief kills Ryan, I feel like it's implied that he shows a slight mutual respect for Ryan, understanding his desire to be noble

Wanna fight?

In the final scene, the Police chief sings to the Police force, a passionate song, demonstrating his dedication to the force. The final moment, after he finishes the song, has the chief standing awkwardly, looking out rather sadly. In this moment I realized: the plot of this movie was just another day for him, he has killed and will kill again, he deals with the absolute dregs of society in the biggest cesspool of the world, he wants to bring swift and painful punishment to those who bring sin into his jurisdiction, but he will fight an endless uphill battle.

Ignore other post. The plot is a cop goes after criminals. Was that too complicated for you?

Ryan can't fight

I coulda swore the character was a pro muay thai boxer, he's literally doing a stance in the poster, but it's been a while since I've seen it.

He owned a Muay Thai gym, partially as a front for the drug dealing, but possibly because he liked the fighting. He was slow and poorly coordinated, he couldn't fight because he was kind of a retard.

Good summary. But does Gosling really get killed in the end? I thought since he saw the error in his ways, the cop "rewards" him by letting him go, only that his hands are going to get cut off first.

There is this hand motif in the movie.

It's unclear actually. I figured he would bleed out from having his hands cut off but I guess it sort of does imply that the cop was being more lenient on him than the others. Yeah, I guess it does imply that the cop let him live, good point.

bump

This was pure dog shit

holy filtered

The stock NPC response to something that is rightfully called the garbage it is.

Refn is a hack.

film board

doesn't comprehend form, emotion and beauty

grim

What's refns problem? I've been watching Too Old To Die Young and it's painfully slow. Beautiful cinematography thoughever.

I find it harder to self-insert with this one so I must disagree

TAKE IT OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOFFFFFFFFFFFFFF

Having been to Thailand I found this movie to be incredibly true to life and an incredibly accurate encapsulation of the vibe of Bangkok, down to minute details like how the streets look, the colors of the lights of the city, the interiors, the restaurants, the slums, the hotel, the muay thai gyms, the police chief character felt very much like the people I met in Thailand. More than that, the portrayal of extremely mentally ill white criminals in Bangkok felt like an extremely accurate portrayal of a lot of the white people in Bangkok, so many of the foreigners in Thailand are just so incredibly sketchy. Refn definitely wrote this movie in Bangkok or after traveling to Thailand, it reallly captures the vibe.

I prefer the remake

Wrong. Its grittier and has a sleazy crime movie feel which is nice, but the narrative is nonsensical and the movie is basically all style over substance. Its like Refn gets these visual ideas in his head, tried to tie them together into one movie, and didnt do a good job of it.

Drive is better because its a much more organized narrative and it has some actual human emotions and interactions in it. Drive has soul, this movie is so off putting because every single character acts like an alien or robot or something so you cant connect with it.

the narrative is nonsensical

Retarded criticism. The narrative is captivating, creative and meaningful. Honestly don't understand how someone could say that if they paid any attention at all, I feel like people who say that about pretty much anything usually just have trouble following stuff...

Drive is not much of a narrative at all. He talks to some girl and does a failed robbery, it's a meaningless movie.

a meaningless de-power fantasy showing that a man like gosling wouldn't be a badass cool guy who handles people, he's mostly a dog like retard who does what people tell him and then he accepts it when he gets bit because that's the fate of retarded people like him. maybe the hand motif was supposed to be a doubling or mirroring aspect highlighting that gosling is only his actions (or his hands, his artifact of control) he's not an intelligent or clever person. He's simply a face in this movie which may have been the point? His lack of agency and identity lead to him being used and discarded but he's fine with it because he understands the game.

There is this thing where snobs and tryhards hate narrative for some reason. Book fags think books should only ever be about prose and fuck the story, film fags think films should only ever be about visuals and fuck story, even gamers will say its all about gameplay and fuck story.

The reality is that stories are all anyone really cares about. If you dont have a compelling story, or narrative, serving as the skeleton of any sort of medium, it becomes tasteless goop.

Why was this an Animal Kingdom ripoff? Both have a crime family led by an overbearing mom with incest innuendo

That's an interesting point honestly, I agree that the hand theme had to do with agency.

Refn never recovered from this, his legacy will amount to being a meme director because of it.

Modern audiences have a false notion that all stories have been told and everything is a repeat of a past story. While this may be true in some ways, I honestly think that new stories can be told when they have a good amount of complexity and specificity.

As well as this, a lot of people associate the idea of "plot" with "heroes journey", they think anything that isn't a heroes journey doesn't have a plot. Sitcoms and the idea of "slice of life" shows really contribute to people criticizing things that aren't a heroes journey as not having a plot.

I honestly have no idea why critics gave this movie negative reviews and convinced midwits it was bad. I honestly think that low IQ audiences simply couldn't understand the family backstory and didn't understand the lieutenant's motivation. People got filtered by the cerebral scenes representing Gosling's character's daydreams. People didn't like the pedophilia and incest and gruesome murder. This movie filters people for purely peripheral reasons and midwits cling to weak criticisms like it was "slow and boring" which I don't think is true or valid