THIS nasty, disagreeable, brutish movie gets three stars for its implication of some uncomfortable truths about culture clash.

Ryan Gosling plays Julian, whose Bangkok kick-boxing club is a front for narcotics smuggling.

His older brother Billy has murdered a 14-year-old sex worker. Retired cop Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm) lets the dead girl’s grieving father kill Billy then lops off the father’s right hand to balance the situation.

Julian’s mother Crystal, head of the smuggling operation, a juicily wicked role for Kristen Scott Thomas in a blonde wig, commands Julian to avenge Billy’s murder.

Vicious cruelty characterises the film’s moral and dramatic standards. Gosling has top billing, but the principal character is without doubt Chang, laconic, unemotional, as comfortable using sharp tools to render a minor criminal blind and deaf as he is crooning karaoke at a nightclub.

About the attitude of Thai tourism authorities toward Nicholas Winding Refn’s film, one can only conjecture. However, the ethos deeply embedded in the screenplay is a subtle averment that Western exploitation of Asian, and particularly Thai, cultural life is pernicious and evil. Refn’s narrative model uses dark visual values to reinforce the gore.

Has God forgiven? Why should He? And if so, what?

At Palace Electric