Regardless of how the final product lands with me and with audiences, Only God Forgives could exist solely as a series of trailers and still be a moderate success. (I feel the same way about some of the trailers for the Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby.) When the synthesizer hits in the middle of the trailer, the deep red lights make me think I'm in the middle of a David Lynch movie, but there isn't anything weird going on here. Just revenge thriller shit.
This new trailer from Yahoo! Movies, a green band clip no less, is just as powerful and intense as those that have come before it, even while offering up most of the same footage as the other trailers.
We get to see Gosling’s numb face when he’s told about his brother’s death, and he’s told he can’t go killing cops anymore. And it’s good that he at least asked, “When?” here, because just having him say, “Wanna fight?” at the end of these trailers has lost its oomph by now, and while I really like Gosling as an actor, his characters in the last few years are almost boring to watch when taken out of the films’ contexts. Maybe I’m just being Kristin Scott Thomas’ puppet here.
In fact, Thomas is still the dramatic human force behind these trailers, and that dinner scene is so heavily focused on, I’m thinking it must be one of her only big scenes in the film, though I certainly hope not. Her brusqueness is definitely welcome within a Nicolas Winding Refn film, or in any film for that matter. It would have given Bel Ami a different twist.
Ryan Gosling will attempt to get revenge for his brother’s death with the Cannes-polarizing Only God Forgives swings its machete through theaters on July 19.
