Too Old To Die Young Review: Thirteen Hours Of Vibrant, Dark, Perverse And Philosophical Narration
Cast: Miles Teller, Augusto Aguilera, John Hawkes, Jena Malone, William Baldwin, Cristina Rodlo, Nell Tiger Free
Director: Nicolas Winding Refn
Streaming Platform: Amazon Prime Video
Filmyhype.com Ratings: 4.5/5 (four and a half stars) [yasr_overall_rating size=”large”]
We missed a masterpiece in 2019 Too Old To Die Young but now we are late but not wrong. A masterpiece that we loved so much also in 2023. After watching Copenhagen Cowboy we watched this series on Prime Video. There are directors who, once they have found the formula that best suits their way of thinking and making cinema, sit on it with folded arms, repeating it for the rest of their career, proposing the same thing without interruption and stubbornly calling it art and then there are those who don’t know the word compromise, only interested in updating their vision of the audiovisual macrocosm. Nicolas Winding Refn belongs to the second category, and from this point of view, the entrance to the increasingly large and permissive world of television is to be considered not only inevitable for his cinema and for his desire to create scandal but even almost physiological. Too Old To Die Young is the purest extremity of the work of the subversive punk Danish author and finally, after the passage of episodes, four and five at the Cannes Film Festival which he had already outraged in 2013 with Only God Forgives.
The series arrives on Amazon Prime Video determined to subvert the rules of streaming on demand, bending to them in form (we are at an altitude of ten episodes of over an hour each) but pushing the content elsewhere from her. The advent of streaming platforms has allowed experimentation that we could only imagine before. Just think of Netflix which, in the last year, has released a 15-episode series, but also media experiments such as Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (the interactive film that thinks about free will or, better, its absence). Refn dedicated 2 years to the production and editing of his series – which debuted on June 14 on Amazon Prime Video – assuming to viewers and critics that it just wasn’t going to be a series. And she was right: Too Old To Die Young (presented at Cannes 2019) could be a thirteen-hour film, but also 10 films of one hour (sometimes an hour and a half) each.
Too Old To Die Young Review: The Story
Too Old to Die Young is so alienating that it’s difficult to even collect ideas to understand what it’s about. The story revolves around Martin (a beautiful and hyper-American Miles Teller), a Los Angeles policeman who finds himself working as a hitman for criminal organizations. On the horizon, however, there is a major crisis of conscience that will make him think about his choices and his motivations. Surrounding him are an underage girlfriend (Nell Tiger Free) and her cocaine addict father (William Baldwin), the head of a Mexican criminal cartel (Augusto Aguilera) and his wife (Cristina Rodlo), a new age medium and holy woman (Jena Malone) who thanks to his henchman (John Hawkes) dedicates his life to cleaning up society from rapists, violent and pedophiles.
The world that Refn paints, like any other product that bears his name, is warped and unreal. Psychedelic and (as always) neon. A menacing air hovers over its inhabitants that every moment refers more to universal judgment: to the moment in which everyone will have to pay for her faults because deep down we are all guilty of something. Nobody is really happy; nobody is safe when it comes to justice. In short, a lot of things happen, and they are all quite bizarre in the series which, however, we can’t help but think, is a lot less brilliant and layered than it thinks it is. The screenplay written by Refn, Ed Brubaker and Halley Wegryn Gross is pretentious without managing to reach the heights of the Danish filmmaker’s previous works such as Only God Forgives (2013) or The Neon Demon (2016). Refn deliberately directs his actors at a crazy pace, taking what seems like an infinite amount of time.
To counteract the events of Jesus (Augusto Aguilera), son of a boss of the Mexican cartel, Magdalena (Carlotta Montanari), killed – perhaps accidentally, perhaps not – by Martin just before the start of the series: he was in love with her, not only as a son but caringly, and in addition to trying to get his revenge he will try to replace that love through marriage to Yaritza (Cristina Rodlo), a woman with mysterious intentions. Among Yakuza soldiers, violent pornographers, Mexican cartel assassins, members of the Russian mafia, gangs of teenage assassins, pedophiles and openly Nazi police officers, Refn navigates a parallel universe in which good seems to have disappeared from the Earth, a universe made of silent cities and boundless deserts, tarot cards, folklore, dark cults, nocturnal chases and imbalances between the obsessive-compulsive search for visual beauty and the horrors born from that vision.
When you look at a work by Refn, you do so with the awareness of entering a world that exists only and exclusively in Refn’s head, made up of allegories and unscrupulous contemplation, of violence as extreme as it is sudden, of elements of genre cinema that collide with the art-house one. And herein lies the paradox surrounding the existence of Too Old To Die Young: taking the format of streaming, the most accessible to date, and reshaping it in the image and likeness of one’s cinema, which only in one case (Drive) was designed to reach as wide an audience as possible. And therefore Too Old To Die Young, however accessible to all, does not want to be accessible to all. Indeed, Refn seems to want to do everything to distance himself from the general public, and his goal seems to be to test the viewer to find out how much he can resist, how much he is willing to go all the way (“Either with me, or against of me”, not surprisingly).
Too Old To Die Young Review and analysis
We can find a mix between Drive and Only God Forgives at the basis of Too Old To Die Young, especially in the way Refn asks his protagonist to imitate in all respects the communicative hermeticism imposed on Ryan Gosling in those films – and in particular, the Danish director chooses the complex and allegorical world of Only God Forgives rather than the pop-glam one of Drive. There is no shortage of references to the other works in his filmography – even back to the lesser-known beginnings, with the Pusher and Bleeder trilogy, but the most attentive will also catch a nod to Neon Demon and Bronson- but the point of reference remains that of Only God Forgives, as is already clear from the first episodes. But Refn does not rest on his laurels and indeed continues to add suggestions and influences to his work, landing in completely new situations for his cinema (from western to comedy, passing through the ghost movie, up to a metaphysical fantasy epilogue).
Silently observing the brutality that takes place in front of the camera and welcoming it reflects all of Refn’s passion for oriental cinema (think of how Takeshi Kitano describes violence, with dryness and inevitability) but also the desire-mission to take the b-series cinema that he has always idolized and strip it of all frills, empty it of the superfluous (dialogues, everything related to sentimentality, even action) to inject into it only what interests him. There is simply nothing comparable to Too Old To Die Young in today’s crowded television landscape: what comes closest, in terms of unitary artistic vision, could be Twin Peaks: The Return of David Lynch, which however in that specific case he rode (in his way, of course) the wave of the revival by leveraging the fans of the original series and the new audience who had always and only heard of Twin Peaks without ever facing it head-on, knowing it without experiencing it on their skin.
Refn’s series, on the other hand, does not rely on anything or anyone, except on the illustrious stage of a streaming platform free to take risks with similar content because, essentially, it cannot fail. HBO and Game of Thrones have shown us that television has now reached the level of Hollywood blockbusters and that even TV can deserve the big screen, while Amazon, Refn and Too Old To Die Young reaffirm the interchangeability of two media by affirming the opposite, and that is, that these types of extremisms could no longer find space in cinemas, deserving to end up on the small screen. Perhaps some viewers will not go further than the first episode, but the uniqueness that Too Old To Die Young can boast is indisputable and unmatched.
It is a daring and brilliant product that undoubtedly tests the limits of its audience, even those who can define themselves as more open to artistic experimentation. Too Old to Die Young is not a work for the general public: the target is critics, cinephiles and enthusiasts. Anyone who does not belong to these skimpy categories and decides to approach them will abandon them immediately. To understand how alienating and different from anything else the vision of the series is, just think that episodes 4 and 5 were made available to the press present at the French Festival (and to the sites that requested a preview). In the middle. As if the order of vision doesn’t matter. And maybe that’s the case: even according to Refn himself, it doesn’t matter whether you decide to watch the whole series or just a few episodes.
Too Old To Die Young Review: The Last Words
Refn does not bend his art to the television medium but makes the exact opposite happen, showing us that these types of extremisms may have no place in the cinema these days: not at all intimidated by having become accessible to millions of viewers with a click via streaming, i.e. the most immediate entertainment service available on the market, the Danish author takes his most complex and hated the film, Only God Forgives, to expand it into thirteen hours of vibrant, dark, perverse and philosophical narration, which comments on our world by putting bare the atrocities that burn in the human soul.
