{"id":1700,"date":"2019-06-30T14:33:48","date_gmt":"2019-06-30T14:33:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/otherpeoplesmovies.com\/?p=1700"},"modified":"2022-07-21T15:52:57","modified_gmt":"2022-07-21T15:52:57","slug":"too-old-to-die-young-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/otherpeoplesmovies.com\/index.php\/2019\/06\/30\/too-old-to-die-young-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Too Old to Die Young (2019) Review"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Miles Teller in Too Old to Die Young<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

While recently reviewing Terry Gilliam\u2019s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote<\/em>, I was struck with the realization that I am no longer able to separate my love and knowledge of the filmmaker\u2019s career from my opinion of his most recent films. It is very important to note before reviewing his new ten-episode, thirteen-hour Amazon Prime series Too Old to Die Young<\/em> that I am now, officially, unable to do the same with Nicolas Winding Refn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Along with Gaspar No\u00e9 and Harmony Korine, Refn is one of the few filmmaking auteurs from a generation that has little room for auteurs. With each new entry, Refn\u2019s films have progressed to a place that run entirely on their own logic and play by their own rules. From his gritty beginnings with the Pusher <\/em>trilogy to his flirtation with the mainstream through Drive <\/em>to his ingeniously nonsensical fashion horror comedy The Neon Demon<\/em>, Refn has been refining his own personal genre for over twenty years.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Refn\u2019s genre consists of infinite cinematic references and is filled to the brim with depictions of heavily stylized and graphic violence, torture, incest, rape and other depravities that go beyond most of our imaginations. As he\u2019s evolved, he\u2019s further pushed himself into the territory of modern surrealism (if there\u2019s any current successor to David Lynch, it is unquestionably Refin), creating action films and\/or genre efforts that are filtered through dream logic and other arthouse sensibilities. The predominant atmosphere in his films has come to resemble an eighties exploitation b-movie, but one that is consistently balanced with moments of ethereal beauty\u2014which has been properly highlighted by the skilled electronic ambience of composer Cliff Martinez since 2011\u2019s Drive.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Jena Malone in Too Old to Die Young<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The good news for Refn fans is that Too Old to Die Young <\/em>is a complete and unapologetic culmination of where his career has been heading up to this point. It\u2019s an epic crime saga about revenge, corruption and perversion that is told at a leisurely pace in the most dreamlike of manners\u2014and it\u2019s all peppered with random and sudden bursts of absurdly graphic sex and violence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Miles Teller headlines the series as a corrupt police\nofficer. After his partner is gunned down by a drug lord\u2019s son (Augusto Augilera)\nseeking vengeance, Teller starts moonlighting as a hired killer for a powerful drug\ndealer (Babs Olusanmokum). His seedy life gets more complicated when his\ndisturbed underage girlfriend (Nell Tiger Free) introduces him to her sleazy\nmillionaire father (William Baldwin) right around the time he is also being\npromoted to detective. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Teller\u2019s investigation of a murdered pedophile leads him to a dying hitman (John Hawkes) who only hunts predators. Hawkes is working for a lawyer (Jena Malone) who specializes in defending abuse victims and uses her practice as a means of finding new targets. Teller develops something resembling a conscience, and decides to only kill the really <\/em>bad guys for his boss while he starts training to work with Hawkes and Malone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Christina Rodlo in Too Old to Die Young<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

After lying low in Mexico, Augilera returns to America with\nhis new wife (Cristina Rodlo) to take over his departed drug lord mother\u2019s\nbusiness. His first task is to stop Olusanmokum from dominating his mother\u2019s\nestablished territory, and a war ensues with many parties caught in the\ncrossfire. An avenging female known only as The High Priestess of Death soon\nraises her head and chaotically throws any preconceived notions (of the\ncharacters or the audience) completely out the window.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While that covers the gist, it doesn\u2019t even being to explain\nthe experience of watching Too Old to Die\nYoung <\/em>unfold into its beautifully twisted entirety. Part of its disturbed\njoy comes from understanding early on that there\u2019s no way of predicting the\noutcome of any scenario. For all its audacity and because of the singularity in\nRefn\u2019s vision, there is nothing else quite like it in episodic\u2014or any other–format.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Too Old to Die Young<\/em>\nalways feels like it\u2019s following the course of a larger (albeit insane) plan\u2014no\nmatter how many seemingly random deviations it takes from it. Each of the\nseries\u2019 ten episodes (or \u201cchapters\u201d as they\u2019re technically referred to) works\nat its own carefully specific pace to cover its own selection of events. It is\nultimately a sprawling story told in segments that amounts to a grand and\ndizzying whole.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Aesthetically, the series is a continuation of the impeccably assaultive neon lighting and nonlinear, expressionistic editing that dominated the styles of Only God Forgives<\/em> and The Neon Demon<\/em>\u2014Refn\u2019s two previous feature efforts. \u201cNormal\u201d lighting for Refn and cinematographer Darius Khondi is to bathe the actors and their surroundings in thick red and blue hues–which the admittedly colorblind Refn appears to favor to the point of fetishisation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Miles Teller in Too Old to Die Young<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Every member of the cast blends seamlessly into their roles\nand into Refn\u2019s world. Teller gives a grounded, stoic and near-silent (think\nGosling in Drive<\/em>) performance. Like\nmost Refn protagonists, he reacts and conveys emotion through stillness, and\nthe inherent charisma of his presence (again, like Gosling\u2019s) allows us to\nempathize with and care for him\u2014in spite of how morally devoid his character\nrepeatedly proves himself to be. Teller portrays a conflicted character, a man\ntorn between two worlds and two sides of himself. He\u2019s able to convey this with\nsubtlety and restraint, and the young actor proves himself capable of achieving\na mature and long-lasting career.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s almost needless to say that veterans Malone and Hawkes deliver\noutstanding performances. They both represent Refn\u2019s version of a hero\u2014flawed,\nbroken and filled with pain and regret. The only good they can make of it is to\nunleash destruction and vengeance on those worse than they are. Olusanmokun\ngives a breakout performance as Teller\u2019s drug dealer boss, portraying the\ncharacter in bouts of quiet and focused intensity that crack into moments of\nunbridled insanity under the most extreme of circumstances.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Aguilera has a steely and wounded presence as the newly\nappointed Mexican drug lord who really<\/em>\nneeds to get over his obsession with his dead mother. His perverse little boy\nlost portrayal is as strangely sensitive in the series\u2019 beginning as it is\nhorrifically brutal by the end. Rodlo shines as the dominant wife with a\nmysterious past, believably and effortlessly owning every character she comes\nacross onscreen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The true standouts in the cast, however, stem from the subplot involving Teller\u2019s unwise decision to date a minor. Free portrays his underage girlfriend, who is traumatized by the suicide of her addict mother, with a tough-shelled, soft-cored vulnerability. She consistently reminds us she\u2019s the true victim of the series\u2019 events without excessively advertising it. Baldwin, completely and perversely unhinged, portrays her father as a loving man who sincerely wants what\u2019s best for his daughter–but also can\u2019t hide the fact that he\u2019s indisputably the source of what compels her increasingly poor and reckless decisions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Augusto Augilera in Too Old to Die Young<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Too Old to Die Young <\/em>is\na conclusion that Nicolas Winding Refn has been coming to for his entire\ncareer. It is filled with heart, humor, passion, blood, guts, romance, innovative\ntechnique, and uniquely refined artistry. Its beauty is in its ugliness\u2014and\nvice versa. The important thing to remember is that all these attributes are\nbeing mirrored through Refn\u2019s skewered perspective\u2014where humor is a Trump-era\npolice lieutenant portrayed by Hart Bochner (aka Ellis from Die Hard<\/em>) re-enacting the crucifixion of\nJesus to inspire his squad, where passion is gunning down a trailer park filled\nwith rapists and child molesters and where romance is a man having his wife\npretend to be his mother while sodomizing him with the handle of a bullwhip.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Needless to say, those wanting the Refn who melded his\nsensibilities with the mainstream and made Drive\n<\/em>(which did not originate with him) will be sorely disappointed by the epic\narthouse installment of his subconscious that is Too Old to Die Young. <\/em>Those who can\u2019t get enough of his\ncandy-colored madness will be nothing short of thrilled as every minute of its\nthirteen hours unspools before their eyes. It is an unabashed celebration of a\nfilmmaker in full command of his gloriously bold, dementedly special voice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019d like to think that Too Old to Die Young <\/em>could be a strong, sweeping finish to this chapter of Refn\u2019s career as he embarks on pushing himself elsewhere in the next. I\u2019d like to see him ground himself like he did with Drive <\/em>and do a project that\u2019s a tad more accessible while still retaining his own unique aesthetics\u2014then see where his unfiltered artistic whims take him after that. If Refn keeps following the same unchecked trajectory he\u2019s currently on, there\u2019s potential that his next effort could implode as a result.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While Nicolas Winding Refn hasn\u2019t quite reached the level of exclusivity that many auteurs do later in their careers, he\u2019s getting dangerously close. All great works walk the line between success and failure, accessibility and pretension–but Refn\u2019s line is getting thinner with each new project. That\u2019s part of what makes his work so utterly thrilling, however, and part of why Too Old to Die Young<\/em>\u2019s pay-off is ultimately so great: it always keeps you guessing just where, exactly, it could fall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GRADE: A<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While recently reviewing Terry Gilliam\u2019s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, I was struck with the realization that I am no longer able to separate my love and knowledge of the filmmaker\u2019s career from my opinion of his most recent films. It is very important to note before reviewing his new ten-episode, thirteen-hour Amazon Prime series […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1704,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1700","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/otherpeoplesmovies.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/otherpeoplesmovies.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/otherpeoplesmovies.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/otherpeoplesmovies.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/otherpeoplesmovies.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1700"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/otherpeoplesmovies.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1700\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3197,"href":"https:\/\/otherpeoplesmovies.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1700\/revisions\/3197"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/otherpeoplesmovies.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1704"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/otherpeoplesmovies.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/otherpeoplesmovies.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/otherpeoplesmovies.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}