God would forgive anyone who can’t stomach Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn‘s deeply flawed, sometimes repugnant, but utterly fascinating, “Too Old To Die Young.” A 10-episode, 13-hour TV streaming experience for Amazon Prime—hypnotic and sometimes mind-numbing in equal measure— ‘TOTDY’ is a bold and blistering political treatise on American rot and the morally polluted septic tank our failing empire has become. It’s also a post “Twin Peaks: The Return,” Jodorowsky-esque, Jean-Pierre Melville-ian existential crime drama that seethes with anger and contempt.
Buzzing with audacity and arrogance even this supercilious provocateur hasn’t demonstrated before and dripping with mesmeric Lynchian uber-style, Refn’s perverse intentions are almost always pornographic and grotesque, even when approaching the utterly mundane. The mini-series is a tough sit; deliberately challenging, goading, repulsive and at times, pushing the limits of somnambulism, decency, and taste. And yet the sleazy and incendiary show is scorching and compelling like nothing you’ve seen in cinema this year, transcendent of mediums the way Lynch’s aforementioned nouveau “Twin Peaks” was. Refn’s become disgusted with America, its politics, its policies, its people, and everything we’ve tolerated. You can almost hear his knuckles crack before the first wind up swing towards our soon-to-be shattered senses.
A collaboration with acclaimed comic book writer Ed Brubaker, who we can only assume is as disgusted with the state of the U.S. as Refn is, in its disturbing and atmospheric opening scene—neon-soaked, L.A. decay all around— a police officer pulls out his flip phone, angling it towards his partner and coldly says, “I think I’m gonna have to kill her, man.”
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This agent of law enforcement, Larry (Lance Gross), a black, married, hateful misogynist— showing off a nude photo that’s he’s been sent by the unpredictable sidepiece that’s threatening to ruin his marriage—will soon pull an attractive woman over for “reckless driving,” threaten to rape, and then extort her, while his partner watches, stone silent. Shortly after, Larry is shot and killed in a surprise ambush, while the other officer, Martin, (Miles Teller) is eventually promoted to detective after lying on the record.
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By teaming up with the Eisner Award-winning Brubaker— who co-created the Winter Soldier character from “Captain America” lore, and is famously known in pulp noir circles for his ongoing series, “Criminal”— Refn’s streaming project will surely either be seen as a wickedly divine blessing of the hard-boiled genre gods or a obscene curse of insensitive, lewd crime pornography worthy of scorn. Make no mistake, “Too Old To Die Young” is a self-convinced, contemptuous magnum opus that doubles down on its creator’s proven styles, it’s a dirty work of trashy B-movie art, so formally flippant it simply will repel most audiences. Parts of it go way, way too far and go on for far too long. But the moral barrier that’s blatantly urinated on is part of what makes elements of the series so sickly f*cking brilliant and watchable, even if you’re skin crawls at the same time.
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The plot is thin but essentially centers on a lost soul (Teller’s cop Martin), living a double life, who’s numb to the world and lost the ability to feel anything. After Martin’s corrupt partner is killed, he falls in with a dangerous group of gangsters, led by a merciless man with a ghastly soothing rasp, named Damien (Babs Olusanmokun), whom Larry worked for in the past. Damien is key to unraveling the motivations for what seems like the random shooting of his partner. The murderer is Mexican cartel prince, Jesus (Augusto Aguilera), deathly obsessed with his dearly departed mother Magdalena (Carlotta Montanari) who was killed by Martin. Only, Jesus killed Larry in retaliation, by mistake.
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After the introduction of these players and the scuzzy world of dirty cops and crime kingpins, “Too Old To Die Young,” suddenly and abruptly shifts gears, devoting itself entirely to a bloated and minimalist, world-building escapade to Mexico, where we meet Yaritza (Cristina Rodlo), aka “The High Priestess of Death,” the vengeful, mysterious and tarot-card reading femme fatale, whom Refn shoots with glorious, erection-inducing rapture. It’s something out of an absurdist, surrealist Mexican telenovela; a wtf family drama about legacy, heirs, and dynasties that are totally confusing at the time (what does this have to do with the show we’re watching?), but Refn is slowly uncoiling this problematic masterwork.
Back in Los Angeles, more characters seep into the narrative; a vigilante assassin named Viggo (John Hawkes) and the self-appointed, young matriarch who assigns his targets; Diana (Jena Malone), a sort of new age-y soothsayer who uses mood rings, or stones, to track her depraved criminal targets. They are essentially morality hunting and the wicked—the pedophiles, the rank scumbags of the world—will soon meet their violent reckoning.
Eventually, Martin gets entangled, and is recruited as a vicious avenger for injustice, alongside Viggo. The concept is glaringly similar to Brubaker’s recent serial comic series, “Kill Or Be Killed.” Martin will kill as many porn rapist moguls, and kidnapping child molesters as exist in the city, but he won’t end someone’s life because they owe someone $8,000.
There are peripheral players too, all factoring into Refn and Brubaker’s ideas of the outrageous and immoral. Martin is also dating a damaged underage teenager, Janey (Nell Tiger Free) and Billy Baldwin lends his over-the-top talents as her perverted, coked-out millionaire father, Theo, who keeps Janey’s room at the tail end of his art gallery, full to the brim with cute stuffed tigers and other plushy wild animals that have their own pedo-sick connotations.
Moody voyeurism, throbbing eroticism, machismo, misogyny, Brubaker and Refn aren’t going for subtle here. It’s a masochistic narrative and a kind of titillating self-indulgent masturbation the filmmakers want to dare you to masturbate to. Refn and Brubaker have obsession on the mind and why people become fixated with these sick things on a primal level, and how that can lead a once-shining country like ours to where we are now, how the root of violence can cause an entire empire to crumble.
The brazen series is constructed in a way that is so purposelessly vile, so problematically self-reflexive, that it veers far past provocative social commentary, circling back around into a blatant semiotic parody of post-Trump, Los Angeles. ‘TOTDY’ is a surreal city nightmare, a disintegrating, David Lynch-like, urban noir prison, without the charm; instead its near devoid of all human compassion. It knows exactly what it wants to say about modern culture and America, and it doesn’t care what anyone thinks about its discomforting texture and confrontational intention. It brutally throws all creative indulges into on to its canvas, deliberately dialing their base tendencies to 11, daring the viewer to hit “stop” with a snide and smug grin of gloss and glee.
Narcoleptically drowsy and stultifying at first, it’s almost as if the filmmaker is throwing buckets of languorous plot paint and hateful cardboard cutouts in front of the camera. But, with aid from synth composer, Cliff Martinez’s eerie audio bombardment (part slinky sex, part dungeon-y aural horror hallucination-soundscape), plus cinematographer Darius Khonji’s haunting eye for enthralling lighting, the show’s early episodes slowly spellbind. Eventually, and discursively, the overarching structure takes shape, and an obscene vision of cynically self-aware, yet somehow beautifully fucked up, comic (cosmic?) nihilism rears its ugly face.
Like Quentin Tarantino, Refn’s self-satisfied cocksurity—a kind of conceited, sweaty, heavy breathing you can feel on the back of your neck in the filmmaking itself—is off-putting. Refn’s transgressive tactics can be exasperating and juvenile, but “Too Old To Die Young” is arguably the defining case for the merits of arty masturbatory pretention as awe-inspiring singular vision.
As the series comes to an end Jesus gives a bat-shit powerful monologue on ethnic/cartel pride, the excruciating need to take power and the inevitable future downfall of our civilization; his platform, more torture. This manifesto is ludicrous and jaw-dropping, much like the show itself. Testing your gag reflex in every other episode, “Too Old To Die Young,” is a blatantly symbolic, modern day, genre fetish; its climactic shootout stripped down to Seijin Suzuki-like Yakuza film abstraction. This isn’t a work made to address this country’s dire gun control situation directly or its child in cages problem (which it presciently mentions). In order to heal the hunter and break free of prescribed moral polarity, Refn and Brubaker’s artistic solution is one of brutal self-preservation through irreverent crime-noir parody, pornographic images and total self-immolation. [A-]
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