As I’ve written before, I’m a big fan of writer/director Nicolas Winding Refn. He makes weird, intense and visually stunning films. Refn teams up again with Ryan Gosling for Only God Forgives and after loving Drive to death I was really excited to see this. I don’t know what I just watched.

I have the absolute reverse view on this than I do Drive. Everything I liked about Drive was absent here. Weird as hell, unreliable characters. A story that has some good ideas but does little more than just spin its wheels with so little going on. While the cinematography is there, this probably would have made a better half hour short film.

Ryan Gosling plays Julian, a drug smuggler who operates in Bangkok. His awful brother gets into trouble and gets what’s coming to him. Julian’s awful mother pushes him to avenge his brother’s death which leads to nothing good. Julian is a weird, stoic guy, much like the Drive character. But all the weird traits for Driver worked in that world and had great payoffs. He was a bad ass with morals and a goal I could root for. I didn’t get any of that from Only God Forgives.

I’m left scratching my head, one of the biggest disappointments for me this year.

I wish I was a bigger fan of this series than I am. It has all the parts of something I’d really be into, but The Hunger Games just can’t seem to hit the bar for me. I’ve read the first book only and thought it was good, the movie being a good adaptation but failed to be really engaging.

Catching Fire gave me the exact same feeling that the first did. It has all the production of an expensive Hollywood movie but left me indifferent about everything happening on screen. First, it’s really predictable. As such, it felt like little more than a bridge episode to something far greater and more interesting in the next movie. We follow down the beaten path to social revolution with the populous being so suppressed that they are just itching to pop the second Katniss says the word. The format and pacing is almost exactly the same as the first movie so that makes it feel even more like a retread. Again we start out in District 12 and see that everything sucks. The seeds of revolution are taking root. Then, the set up for the annual Hunger Games that the evil government loves so much. Katniss and Petea get thrown into The Hunger Games again (cue ‘oh no! This is terrible and unfair!’). We hop on the train and zip back to Hunger Games HQ where we go through the same meet-the-rest-of-the-cast, training and interview segment as before (but wisely done faster), then the actual Game to get to the end where we get a ‘dramatic’ reveal to the credits.

While it’s not a bad movie and series, I don’t understand why it’s so unbelievably popular.