Nicolas Winding Refn’s “Drive” has a reputation even among its admirers of being somewhat flimsy, a bit of cinephilic posturing from a director enamored of cool. From hot-pink retro-chic title cards to a trendy electroclash soundtrack, the film certainly delights in its ample surface pleasures, and yet for all its glittering slickness it isn’t quite accurate to describe “Drive” as strictly superficial. It struggles to articulate its ideas clearly, but the ideas are there nevertheless: It’s a film about the poses men adopt in order to better assert their control over the world, and in particular it is an attempt to work through the implications of those tendencies and undermine their pretense. At its best it represents an effort to reconfigure the violence of action-movie heroics as fundamentally ugly rather than cool, which is why the icy stares and stoicism of its first two acts suddenly erupts into brutality when the story’s vengeance arc reaches its inevitable peak—the poses are meticulously sculpted only so that they may be obliterated. In the end the safe gangland glamor of Ryan Gosling’s nameless driver is exposed as basically grotesque, an affectation masking something darker and more repulsive, and no amount of slo-mo stylization can make up for the ugliness of the violence that follows it.

Taking hyper-masculinity to task in an arthouse action movie is hardly groundbreaking, of course, and Refn’s self-styled “European” sensibility might mount a more compelling argument were it injected with a dose of the levity Paul Verhoeven used to smuggle satire in through mass-market entertainments for more than fifteen years. But the fact remains that Refn has proven himself capable of at least trying to deconstruct the archetypes and cliches he regularly employs, which has the benefit of lending his increasingly impeccable surfaces some much-needed depth—or in any case the illusion thereof. Because if Refn’s films continue to brush up against exploitation, the art-cred trump card that justifies their indulgences is their claim, however tenuous, to something like subversion. It’s a shrewd way for a violence-obsessed filmmaker to have his action-movie cake and beat it up too: his studied approach to spectacle allows him to relish the squibs and crushed skulls that are the fixtures of the form guilt-free.

With his latest outing, “Only God Forgives”, Refn relocates his deconstructed action figurines from the neon-hued Los Angeles streets to an archetypically exotic Bangkok, receding again from American soil but dragging his favorite aryan lead back with him. Refn, perhaps audaciously, pushes his most abrasive qualities as a visual stylist to their logical extreme, once again openly inviting accusations of pedantry: “Only God Forgives” is a film of such delicacy and formal precision that it risks (and arguably crosses over into) self-parody, exaggerating every pose and gesture to the point of seeming sculptural. Refn frames his actors in the dead center of the image, usually bathed in deep red light and furnished with conspicuously Asiatic decor, and though a generous description of the resulting tableaux might invoke Kubrick it seems in truth like little more than a poor imitation.

The tone alternates between self-serious (as during its long stretches of silent brooding) and ridiculous (as when its bubble of calm and sobriety is suddenly ruptured by graphic violence), and as in “Drive” the two dispositions are harshly contrasted in order to make a point about both. “Only God Forgives”, despite the apparent novelty of its setting, retreads old ground for Refn, taking the brutality of masculine poses as its subject and emerging, in the end, with more or less identical conclusions. If you can boil the film down to its thesis, it is simply that justice is a moral question that cannot be properly accounted for by law, leaving it to agents of cosmic retribution to dole out punishment and right the world’s imbalances. Like “Drive”, “Only God Forgives” suggests that acts of vengeance, however appealing or maybe even necessary, can only lead to an extension of suffering. The only difference is that here Refn locates his force of universal justice in one man: a sword-wielding cop who acts as judge, jury, and nasty executioner.

Ryan Gosling, scaling his already muted stone-face down to its expressive minimum, plays Julian, a hard-headed American who runs a Muay Thai boxing gym in Bangkok as a front for his family’s drug dealing operation. His brother, a caricature of ugliness run amuck, rapes and murders a 14-year-old prostitute for his own entertainment, and as a result he meets a brutal death at the hands of the girl’s father—a bit of warranted wrath not only permitted but actively encouraged by Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm), Refn’s all-knowing police chief and the film’s anti-antagonist. This sets off a chain reaction of payback: Julian’s foul-mouthed mother (Kristin Scott Thomas) arrives in town demanding the head of the man who killed her favorite son, who she explains “must have had his reasons” for his acts of rape and murder, which leads in turn to a hired hit against Chang, who will not go down without a fight.

None of this, it probably goes without saying, proceeds with anything like tension, dread, or excitement. Refn keeps things moving languorously as if the film’s pace were timed to a metronome, and he shoots his sequences of increasingly graphic violence as pointed, perhaps even ironic indulgences in the stuff of low-brow schlock. The rest remains purposefully shallow: casting aside drama, characterization, and a well-developed plot, “Only God Forgives” coasts instead on the decadence of its surfaces, from the incessant hum of Cliff Martinez’s ambient-electro score to the sumptuous blacks and reds of its endless velveteen interiors. It isn’t difficult to see the appeal for Refn: as with “Drive”, the combination of arthouse sterility and grindcore violence seems like a shortcut to intellectual depth, as if by virtue of marrying one extreme to the other he has somehow found himself sitting snugly in an ideal in-between. But these elements don’t come close to cohering: one constantly interferes with the other, and the push-pull feel doesn’t so much create an intriguing tension as it does a confusing muddle.

But beyond its architectural problems, “Only God Forgives” suffers from seriously short-sighted ideological issues that prove far more damning: by transplanting his interest in violence and justice from the familiarity of the Western world to the great unknowns of the East, the film falls into a trap of simplistic exoticism and a process of Othering that is deeply problematic. Refn, for all his interest in tearing down illusions of masculinity, has serious difficulties with issues of representation: his conception of Thailand as a steamy hotbed of sin and debauchery borders on casual racism, a problem underscored by his reliance on the kind of archetypal red-light district imagery that makes a vibrant city like Bangkok seem like nothing more than hell on earth. Refn, as a Danish director, shot Los Angeles as a self-admitted tourist too, but the imagery of “Drive” had the distinct advantage of being predicated on its rich history of cinematic representation.

If the results were somewhat superficial—perhaps even disingenuous, in that Refn’s vision of the city didn’t extend beyond the overplayed downtown skyline—they were only superficial for having drawn on so much iconography. “Only God Forgives”, by contrast, has little to draw on beyond the kinds of pop cultural representations of Thailand that are themselves problematic. The crude portrait of the city Refn winds up creating not only propagates ugly Orientalist cliches, it gleefully embellishes them: Bangkok’s depiction as a sweltering, hallucinatory hellmouth pitched on the precipice of its own self-destruction is central to the myth-making Refn is freely indulging in. The film regards Thailand as a place with almost mystical properties, dreamlike and morally askew, where a man can waltz freely down a neon-lit street and purchase, defile, and ultimately murder young women on the cheap—though, of course, at their own peril. Refn’s conception of Bangkok’s homegrown justice, enacted by Chang as if it were his moral prerogative, is meant to assuage concerns of touristic racism: it’s the white men who look the most ugly, who act the most ruthlessly, and who dare to impose themselves on Thailand who are punished as a result.

A generous reading of “Only God Forgives” configures its vision of the East as a deliberately crude caricature, either toward the ends of autocritique (a Western filmmaker acknowledging the stupidity of co-opting a culture and its iconography) or outright genre-movie exploitation. Or perhaps it’s all a nightmare, an outward projection of a tumultuous inner state? The garishness, the excess, and above all the absurdity represent a man working through the ugliness of his mind. It’s hard to say. But even if you’re willing to grant Refn the benefit of the doubt—and I’m not sure I am—the imagery remains problematic even if excused as an illustration of his characters’ mental state. The film reinforces stereotypes—namely that Bangkok is a city comprised entirely of boxing gyms and brothels, as if it were one endless red light district—in order to more effectively (and alluringly) deconstruct archetypes whose dismantling is more important to him personally: he feels compelled to take apart preconceptions of violence and masculinity but in order to do so builds up falsehoods about some weird foreign city. Ironically, that makes “Only God Forgives” more reprehensible, because it isn’t just a matter of style over substance—it’s a matter of style and substance working together to make something toxic.