"Too Old To Die Young" is a 2019 single-season 10-episode TV show written by Nicolas Winding Refn and Ed Brubaker and directed by Refn. These are my barely-congealed brain thoughts after just finishing this enigmatic 13-hour neo-noir movie. I haven't found much online that provides good intelligent in-depth insight into this show, so this is my attempt to process on my own what I just watched. This is not a review (my review is: yes you should watch it); there are massive spoilers.
Holy hell do I love this cinematography. The lighting and camera direction and deliberate focus and the ridiculous lingering uninterrupted slow pans and zooms and tracks is exactly what I want from my tv screen.
But wtf is going on
The description online "a grieving police officer who, along with the man who shot his partner, finds himself in an underworld filled with working-class hit men, Yakuza soldiers, cartel assassins sent from Mexico, Russian mafia captains and gangs of teenage killers" seems like it's describing a different show. Martin is not grieving, he's already in the underworld, there's no Yakuza (the closest we get is that one brief moment with a Korean man with a sword), there's zero Russians let alone mafia, and zero gangs of teenage killers.
Throughout the entire show, we learn almost nothing about our main guy, Martin. He never once answers any questions about his background, never volunteers anything explanatory. About halfway through he gives an ounce of motivation -- saying he wants to kill people who have done bad things -- but we never learn a source of this, and even when he kills Janey's dad, and the audience is given the lead-up of Janey's dad being a rude and disgusting pervert, Martin can't explain his motivation to Viggo at all. Besides killing people, none of his infrequent other actions are explained. Why does he go to Damien with Jesus's photo instead of his captain? Why does he quit being a cop?
But most importantly, what is the point of having a main character who's an enigma? What storytelling function does this serve?
Speaking of main character... I'm assuming here that it's Martin. But is it? The show tracks at various times the POV of primarily Martin, Jesus and Yaritza, and sometimes Viggo and Diana. But none of these characters exactly fit into the standard storytelling structure as our protagonist. Martin is morally bankrupt, lacks any arc, and is unceremoniously tortured to death almost as an afterthought 80% the way through most un-hero-like. Jesus goes from morallly ambiguous to, by the end, with his final rant about killing everyone and becoming a god, decidedly a villain. Yaritza arrives into the story only obliquely and emerges with the most "heroic" story of the bunch, but only gets major screentime at the end of the tale. Viggo's is more like a mentor, until he becomes the pilot of his own strange helter skelter apocalyptic substory. And Diana wouldn't even be in the running except for the final two epidoes which revolve around her.
So obviously none of this fits into standard storytelling structures. But why? Is it just for the effect? About the journey and not the destination?
Watching this on Amazon Prime, they intercut it the show with commercials. Back in 2019 when this was released Amazon didn't have commercials, but now in 2024 they do. Amazon was smart enough to at least stick the commercials at scene changes, but I do not believe Refn created this intending for commercial breaks. Because there would be scenes of horrific violence and sexual brutality and then a jarring hard cut to some advertisement and I doubt the advertiser would be happy knowing that I now associate their product with these things.
I bring this up because one of the ads was for another Amazon Prime tv show, I guess which got selected due to tags, being that it was also a show about police and crime and detectives. But that show was clearly a "the detective is the good guy with rock-solid morals and he fights against evil" type show, which helped put into very stark contrast this Too Old To Die Young show.
It made me think, partway through, that maybe Too Old is a morality tale, where we watch our characters navigate difficult ethical situations and make the best decisions they can, only for the story to ultimately give them their just deserts. But that didn't happen completely, did it? There are times it certainly did, such as: the creepy corrupt cop Larry from the beginning gets killed, the show dedicating some screentime to reminding us that Martin is morally abhorrent for having sex with an underage girl just before he gets tortured to death, the entire subplot with the pornographers, Viggo's entire story basically, and most strongly Yaritza's character being an avenging angel of death.
But there are also very clear counter-examples, such as Jesus never getting any come-uppance whatsoever, Janey just doing the best with a bad situation yet paying the consequences for everyone else's actions, Damian's character becoming increasingly sympathetic just prior to all his friends being shot and him being horifically tortured, and Diana, who... is she lying? Is she magical? Is she a shadowy mastermind? Is she a delusional psycho?
Basically, if this is a morality tale, why are the morals incomplete?
Speaking of Diana (and holy hell do I love watching Jena Malone be weird) ... is she magical? Why is there only one magical character? It's like she's magical, but only to herself. This part of the story I understood the least. Why is her house so luxurious? Surely she's making money from her clients, scamming them and accepting their 'donations' for having killed the villains in their lives, but to the extent shown that her lifestyle is that grand? What's really going on there? And another mystery is her relation with the names she issues to Viggo -- we are provided some corroboration that she's not just making up the crimes of which the names are guilty, yet the way she delivers the information to Viggo is so sketchy as to be made untrustworthy. Yet Viggo is so desperate for any justification to his killings that he'll blindly accept her word, even though Martin (the morally abhorrent one) sometimes wants proof.
And then what the hell was with her final prophecy, the dawn of innocence? Was this supposed to be coherent, or mad ravings?
And back to Martin. The show spends a great deal of time building up his character, showing how ruthless and effective and lethal he is. We see it over and over and over again. And then on the beach he's walking along and Jaime just runs up and *thump* that's it, without even a fight Martin's gone. Surely there's a point to this, but what it is escapes me.
Coming back to this: maybe his anticlimactic end is precisely the point. He's built by the narrative to be the story's hero while undermined by his own abhorrent actions, so maybe his weak death is simply the show's final way of reminding the audience that Martin is not a hero, and he's not even an anti-hero, he's just another villain who can't even protect the one thing he claims to care about (Janey).
The Tarot's relevance also escapes me. Why is Tarot the overarching theme of the show? It's a loose theme at best, only shown on screen occasionally, and it's not (as far as I can tell) used for foreshadowing or allegory or obvious symbolism. It's just there. Why?
Yaritza seems like the real linchpin of the story, doesn't she? "Born in a cave" and coming out from the desert, that's what we know of her. She arrives into the story at the cartel boss Don Ricardo's side, unexplained in her presence until Ricardo explains that she 'scared away' his nurse. And then Don Ricardo dies. Was he Yaritza's first victim? We don't understand that at the time, but looking back at the story from the end, I would venture that he is.
And who's next in line after Don Ricardo? It could be Jesus, but he doesn't challenge his weaker cousin Miguel for the throne, and so Yaritza flounders. Miguel, being gay, has no interest in Yaritza. So the next we see of her is when she's married to Jesus and she accompanies him on his return to LA.
At his side there, she learns what makes Jesus tick, coaches him into a position of power, achieving a level of prominence in the cartel that the henchmen only dream of, elevating herself well above any suspicion of being the High Priestess of Death that she is. Her success in front an oblivious Jesus lampoons Jesus' madman's plans and makes her the only character truly successful in her goals, or at least on the road to success.
And we have to talk about the police. Because the police are depicted in this show not just as corrupt bullies who are a nuisance to those they are supposed to protect, but as full-on incompetent buffoons. There's the beautiful moment where the lead detective instructs Martin on cases with multiple suspects to pick one by rolling "a dice." The surface idiocy is fantastic. The subtle touch of them calling a single die "a dice" filled me with delight. And the symbolism of the police's enforcement (and the universe overall) being simply random is poignant. Maybe THIS moment with the die is the linchpin tying the entire story together.
And the absurdity with the rest of the police scenes are some of the funniest, and also most (seemingly) disconnected with the rest of the story. Larry's memorial where it's not a press conference or mass funeral, but a small handful of cops sitting in a dark cantina drinking orange juice, eating pancakes? What the hell was up with that? I feel like something important was meant by this and I failed to grasp it.
Same with Martin's quitting play, where the lead detective acts like some sort of American Christ. I can't believe this scene was played simply for absurdity, there must've been a deeper reason for its inclusion. But what I cannot fathom.
Damian's reaction to listening in to Detective Red's absurdity on the phone was a beautiful moment of contrast, because nothing in Damian's story or world is played humorously. The detectives, as the only truly middle-class characters in the entire story, are perhaps simply being shown to be completely disconnected from the people they are supposedly trying to catch?
And discussing class. There is a clear class hierarchy theme in this show, with cartel boss Don Ricardo's interactions starting things off -- wiping the police captain's handshake off his palm and describing him as lower class. Jesus learns from this, going on a similar tirade against Alfonso later one, calling him a "gangster" and "wetback" as he whips his subordinate into line. And the brief interaction with the upper-class white neighbor, where Jesus puts on a front of being the same as her, only to later refuse to play 'white' (he's growing!) when his other upper-class neighbors have a party. And then there's the whole things with Janey's ridiculously wealthy coked up pervert father, who among his many perversions talks about "buying" and "owning" Martin. Not that class ends up taking a forefront in his character's story, as the sexual degeneracy overwhelms any discussion of class.
I'm running out of steam here. I think I've got most of my thoughts down. I just re-read through the plot synopsis of all the episodes on Wikipedia, and there many of the events are tied together, in ways that my head didn't connect. Is this because I have poor visual literacy? Or is someone editing Wikipedia to insert their own interpretations and force a clear narrative where the creators intended only a vague one?
Overall, I loved this, even if I'm too dumb to yet understand all of what I saw, and how it connects. I'm getting there, eventually, I hope. Yet in the meantime I still love the visual style, the atmosphere, the mood, the use of music and sound and camerawork and lighting.
I wonder how many times Refn's direction to the actors was, "Ok, so, just stand there and do not move for, like, basically ever."