“Too Old To Die Young” and the problem of the unsupervised auteur

By N.B.

THE RISE of subscription-based channels and streaming services has enabled cinema’s biggest names to develop their own television series, not as a way to make a quick buck between passion projects, but as a way to tell ever longer and richer stories. Following Paolo Sorrentino’s “The Young Pope”, Woody Allen’s “Crisis in Six Scenes” and Ava DuVernay’s “When They See Us”, the latest and most radical example is Nicolas Winding Refn’s ten-part series, “Too Old To Die Young”, released on Amazon on June 14th.

Fans of the Danish director’s films, including “Pusher”, “Drive” and “Only God Forgives”, won’t be surprised to learn that he has come up with another seedy, brutal, yet coolly stylish urban crime thriller. But during its 13-hour running time, two things become clear. The first is that nothing quite like it has ever been made before. The other is that this is probably for the best. Shot by shot, “Too Old To Die Young” is startlingly beautiful. But when all those shots are strung together, the result is so stupefying as to be almost unwatchable.

Co-written by Ed Brubaker, the first episode introduces Martin (Miles Teller), a 30-year-old Los Angeles Country Sheriff, and his partner Larry (Lance Gross). They are both bad cops, but Larry is worse: a typical evening for him is spent harassing women, taking bribes and discussing whether he should murder his cokehead mistress before she can reveal their affair to his wife. It is difficult to be upset when a Mexican youth, Jesus (Augusto Aguilera), walks up to him in the street and shoots him dead. But Martin is afraid that he will be executed next, because he and Larry killed Jesus’s mother, the sister of a druglord. He needs the protection of a Nigerian gangster, Damian (Babs Olusanmokun), and to pay for that service he has to kill whomever Damian chooses.

So much for the first 93-minute episode—or “Volume One” as Mr Refn calls it. The 97-minute second episode abandons Martin and heads down to Mexico, where Jesus meets Yaritza (Cristina Rodlo), a tarot-card reader who styles herself as “The High Priestess of Death”. The 76-minute third episode returns to Los Angeles, where Martin meets Viggo (John Hawkes), a retired FBI agent, and Diana (Jena Malone), a new-age therapist and victim-support officer. With Diana’s help, Viggo goes around murdering rapists, but he wants Martin to take his place as “an extermination machine eliminating all evil in the universe”. And so the series goes on, shifting from blackly comic Tarantino-esque violence to apocalyptic Lynchian surrealism—but doing so very slowly indeed.

“Too Old To Die Young” is relentlessly sleazy and politically dubious, but not many people will sit through it long enough for its exploitative aspects to be an issue. Wallowing in the freedom and the budget that Amazon has given him, Mr Refn lets his hard-boiled saga trudge along at such a lethargic pace that you can leave the room and make a cup of tea in the gaps between the lines of murmured dialogue. It could be argued that the blank, affectless Martin has been numbed by the shock of his partner’s death, but the other characters seem to be just as dazed and deadpan as he is.

Perhaps Mr Refn should be congratulated on conjuring up such a murky atmosphere. Expertly shot by Darius Khondji and Diego Garcia, with a synthesiser-heavy score by Cliff Martinez, “Too Old To Die Young” is set in a world sapped of energy, a purgatory where shaded lamps and neon signs furnish nothing more than faint patches of light in the gloom; so maybe it is appropriate that the characters drift around like ghosts. Perhaps, too, Mr Refn should be congratulated on challenging the audience’s expectations with an anti-thriller, an avant-garde art installation to compare with Andy Warhol’s “Sleep” and “Empire”. The decision to combine bloody-minded perversity with a torpid tempo is certainly daring.

But, for Amazon, it was a mistake to allow Mr Refn to do what he wanted for 13 hours: “Too Old To Die Young” would have been a lot more compelling if it had been 11 hours shorter. After an episode or two, viewers may feel as if they are too old to keep watching.

“Too Old To Die Young” is available on Amazon Prime Video now