Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Too Old to Die Young’ on Prime Video, A Violent Crime Drama Starring Miles Teller

Too Old to Die Young on Amazon Prime Video is a slow-building, hyperviolent crime drama from Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn, known for films like 2011’s Drive, 2013’s Only God Forgives, and 2016’s The Neon Demon. The 10-episode limited series—with most episodes running 75 minutes or more—divided critics when it premiered at Cannes in May. Though it is not technically an Amazon Prime Original, it debuted on the streaming service on June 14. It stars Miles Teller, John Hawkes, William Baldwin, Augusto Aguilera and more.

TOO OLD TO DIE YOUNG: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: The camera slowly pans across a brightly-colored mural of a desert countryside—presumably Mexico—and then reveals a dark parking lot, where two cops (Miles Teller and Lance Gross) are on duty.

The Gist: The Too Old to Die Young pilot introduces us to two cops: Larry (Lance Gross) and his partner, Martin Jones (Miles Teller), who we quickly learn are corrupt. Larry talks about how much he hates women—he calls them “the ultimate evil”—then pulls over a woman who runs a red light, hits on her, threatens her, and eventually steals all the money in her wallet. Martin observes this in stony silence, which, we soon learn is pretty much his signature move.

Moments after their victim leaves, Larry is shot and killed by a mystery man, who tells him, “That’s for my mother.” We later find out Larry killed the mother of that man, whose name is Jesus (Augusto Aguilera), in a robbery gone wrong. Martin, who was also involved in the robbery, realizes Jesus knows who he is, and must figure out how to silence him. That’s not his only problem: He’s also sleeping with a 17-year-old high school girl named Janey (Nell Tiger Free). And no, that’s not Alec Baldwin playing Janey’s creepy father, who holds up a stuffed tiger and pants at Miles Teller—it’s his younger brother, William Baldwin.

Our Take: It’s a long, slow-moving, 91-minute pilot to be sure, but I dug the first episode of Too Old to Die Young. Refn is a bonafide cinematic auteur, and he brings his signature style to this series—AKA, faces bathed eerily in neon light, stationary shots that let his actors move around the screen, and bare-bones dialogue with plenty of long pauses in between.

Teller is doing his best impersonation of an emotionally unavailable robot, and it’s suitably creepy. William Baldwin made me so incredibly uncomfortable I nearly skipped his scenes, and I mean that as a compliment.

The critics who saw Episodes 4 and 5 at Cannes attest to over-the-top, gratuitous violence, and I believe it, but the pilot doesn’t go overboard on the brutality. Instead, it effectively establishes a general atmosphere of unease—that kind of strange discomfort that you just can’t tear your eyes away from. You won’t feel good after watching Too Old to Die Young, but you will feel like you’re right on the cusp of some major insight on the nature of humanity, specifically about the very real epidemic of women-hating men. And isn’t that what art is all about?

Sex and Skin: Callie Hernandez, who plays a cokehead mistress, talks dirty to Larry before he gets shot, and later Miles Teller is shirtless in the bedroom of his 17-year-old girlfriend.

Parting Shot: The pilot leaves us with a shot of Teller looking pensively into the distance.

Sleeper Star: Nigerian-American actor Babs Olusanmokun, who was in the “Black Museum” episode of Black Mirror, plays a character called Damian in this pilot. While I’m not entirely sure what Damian’s deal is just yet—he runs some kind of BDSM cult organization of men who hate women, maybe?—I was completely captivated by Olusanmokun’s calm yet terrifying demeanor.

Most Pilot-y Line: Refn is a pro who knows how to show-not-tell better than anyone, but perhaps the one expository line was: “The last time I was caught fucking around on my wife she took the kids and left,” which Larry says to Martin in the very first scene, as he muses on the pros and cons of killing his mistress.

Our Call: STREAM IT. It’s an investment, sure, but we’re excited to see where Too Old to Die Young goes from here.

Stream Too Old to Die Young on Prime Video