'Too Old To Die Young': Nicolas Winding Refn Revisits His Greatest Hits With Amazon Series [Cannes Review]

Nicolas Winding Refn’s choice to screen the fourth and fifth episodes of his new TV series “Too Old To Die Young” for audiences at the Cannes Film Festival, packaged under the title “North of Hollywood, West of Hell” may strike some as strange. Excerpting a section of a work’s middle makes analysis or appreciation near-prohibitively difficult. Characters pass through the plot, their bearing on it impossible to discern. (Yes, that’s really Billy Baldwin.) Loose scenes float around inside their scripts, unmoored from the quest of principled hitman Martin (Miles Teller) that grants this segment whatever semblance of direction it might have. There is no ending, and not just in the usual sense for the closure-averse Refn. It’s hard not to wonder why he wouldn’t let this particular audience start at the beginning, if constraints of time preclude him from rolling out all thirteen hours soon to appear on Amazon.

READ MORE: The 50 Most Anticipated TV Shows Of 2019

My suspicion — my fear — is that he has cherrypicked the two hours and eighteen minutes containing the highest volume of action and intrigue, and that the tedium largely defining these two episodes runs even stronger through those surrounding them.

Too Old To Die Young

To an extent, some measure of boredom (or, more charitably, tests of the viewer’s patience) is par for the course with Refn, steeped as he is in Danish cinema traditions of stillness and silence. But joining forces with Ed Brubaker, the comic-books giant part-timing on the “Westworld” writing staff, has pushed the elements of his style into unwelcome new territory. Teller must hold at least some of the blame; where Ryan Gosling used facial shivers to telegraph the wellspring of emotions his character held back in “Drive,” Teller merely looks tired and vacant. That said, he’s not responsible for the sloppy state-of-the-nation summarizing, the fetishistic hollowness with which the camera treats women’s bodies, or the long passages in which we beg for something, anything to happen.

READ MORE: ‘Too Old To Die Young’ Trailer

The things that do happen, however, suggest a tough-guy noir so committed to its bit that it sweats pure testosterone as it rips through the arid New Mexican desert. Martin heads there from Los Angeles, where he’s growing weary of his brutal work, on what he sees as a more worthy assignment. A pair of brothers have set up a cottage industry producing pornographic films against the will of the performers, the brains of the outfit being played by James Urbaniak as lurid to the maximum. Well-known as a student of the film arts, Urbaniak sees this production as the best version of itself, with a little theatricality to enliven the air of the po-faced menace. When he extols the virtues of double penetration during a casting-couch session, a more deliciously twisted take on the material comes into view.Too Old To Die Young

Alas, it cannot last. That standout scene, and the serviceably gripping car chase that follows it, have been bookended by torrents of ideological horse-pucky. The first half in particular touches on the rising reactionary tide in America with a certain thick-headedness, as radio shock-jocks rail on about the country’s inevitable return to Dark Ages barbarism and an LAPD staff meeting, dissolves into literal fascist cheerleading. Perhaps the rest of the series will sharpen the entry-level commentary on Trump-despair and global decay with added nuance, though of course, we have no way of knowing for sure one way or the other. This all reeks of Brubaker, the guy responsible for introducing the Tea Party movement to Captain America during his tenure as the series’ primary steward.

READ MORE: The 21 Most Anticipated Movies Of Cannes 2019

That’s not to exonerate Refn, nearly subsumed here by his own style. Cinematographer Darius Khondji invests each and every shot with his trademark polish, but he’s still taking marching orders from an artist content to repeat himself. The success of “Drive” may be the worst thing that could’ve happened to the filmmaker, compelling him to cling to the same old neons, same old synth buzzing, and same old hyper-sterilized violence. The greasiness of “Bronson” stood out from the primeval doom-metal aesthetics of “Valhalla Rising” and the street-level grittiness of the “Pusher” trilogy. This time around, a visit to an Asian crime hideout resulting in a severed finger gets lifted straight from “Only God Forgives.” There’s a difference between a filmmaker developing career-long themes and falling into routine, and Refn’s on the wrong side of that divide.

Too Old To Die YoungRefn likes riling his audience up, and an interlude in which a creep power-washes a nude woman before painting her toenails indicates that he hasn’t lost touch with his inner enfant terrible. If he really wants to raise some hackles, then, he would do well to challenge himself with something fresher than the rehashed frowns and pink-blue color schemes on display once again. There’s nothing shocking about the expected, even when the expected entails ceremonial digit-severing. [C+]

Click here for more Cannes Film Festival 2019 coverage.