This week in movies you missed: Ryan Gosling and Drive director Nicolas Winding Refn, together again. To little purpose.
What You Missed
Brothers Julian and Billy (Gosling and Tom Burke) are drug smugglers who run a fight club in Bangkok. One night, Billy employs and murders a 16-year-old hooker. As the boys’ mom (Kristin Scott Thomas) says when she shows up, “I’m sure he had his reasons.”
The nature of those reasons is moot, because Billy quickly falls victim to vengeance engineered by a cop (Vithaya Pansringarm) with a sharp blade, a fine singing voice and strong notions of right and wrong.
Julian wants to let the matter rest there, given that Billy was kinda indisputably a dick, but Mom is having none of it. She taunts him with insults to his manhood until he reluctantly agrees to seek counter-vengeance. Big mistake.
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you had me at Lynch and “gross use for knitting needles.”
The knitting-needle scene is worth a watch if you aren’t squeamish. (Maybe they weren’t specifically knitting needles. I’m not sure. People don’t normally put knitting needles in flower arrangements unless this is a Thai thing.)