"Only God Forgives" offers us unapologetically despicable people swallowed up into Beth Mickle's otherworldly set designs accompanied by composer Cliff Martinez's throbbing, lushly symphonic music that appears to pay fitting tribute to the score from the 1980s release "Shogun Assassin."
The film's emotional climax, an aggressively sweet ode to motherhood with a Shogun Assassin twist, is awfully ambitious but not entirely successful, with Thurman struggling mightily to convey the personal pain of an ex-lover who's tearfully declaring her fidelity to the child she can hardly bear to have left behind.
What clears him with his accusers is his unabashed admission of his influences within his films, be it Lady Snowblood and Shogun Assassin in Kill Bill , Vanishing Point in Death Proof , or The Dirty Dozen for Inglourious Basterds .