Writer-director Nick Cassavetes smashes melodrama, grindhouse and faux Cormac McCarthy nightmarishness together into a lumbering Frankenstein’s monster of a B movie starring Nikolaj-Coster Waldau. 'God Is a Bullet' : Review
The ‘Hunger Games’ star and Broadway’s Andrew Barth Feldman are a winning duo in this sweet, intoxicating coming-of-age tale that blends ‘Superbad’-style raunch with John Hughes’ vulnerability.Rather, it’s a Manson-style situation, so it’s, you know, serious. When Bob’s ex-wife and her new husband are viciously slaughtered by tattooed Satanists who also abscond with his teenage daughter, the only help on offer comes from the cult’s lone female escapee, an ex-junkie in hiding named Case .
As it is, however, there aren’t any characters of lasting interest. Case is the embittered, thick-skinned trauma survivor to Bob’s straight-laced, God-fearing lawman.
Try as Coster-Waldau and Monroe might, their relationship mostly comes off as the laughably unperformable breather between episodes of cartoonish, screaming mayhem, plus a crammed-in, ludicrous subplot from back home about an abusive cop’s nothing-to-lose housewife that could be outtakes from an AI-assembled soap opera.
None of it is remotely tense, either, because Cassavetes, once a genre-hopping mainstay who hasn’t helmed a feature since 2014’s “The Other Woman,” is on a showboating bender. But it’s the mindset of somebody selling a ’90s heavy metal music video — foregrounding carnival scuzzballs, delighting in brutality, lighting up a desert massacre with fireworks — instead of a storyteller genuinely interested in the push and pull of a bleak crime saga tipping toward irreversible decisions.
And when he does hint at the legacy he believes he’s working in, as in a shot framing Coster-Waldau’s silhouette in a dusty doorway a la John Wayne in “The Searchers,” your thought isn’t “Oh cool” or even “Nice try,” but “Uh, no.” Funkadelic’s “Maggot Brain” is needle-dropped at one point, and you instantly want that gorgeously raw classic slapped right out of this wannabe-soulful soundtrack’s mouth. Whoa, OK. Maybe empty vengeance does beget more empty vengeance.
Canada Latest News, Canada Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
God Is A Bullet review: Jamie Foxx can't save this silly revenge flickThere's no love lost in The Notebook director Nick Cassavetes' gratuitously violent action film co-starring Maika Monroe and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau
Read more »
‘God Is a Bullet’ Review: Nick Cassavetes Delivers a Blood-Soaked Highway to HellAdapted from the author’s 1999 debut novel, “God Is A Bullet” is the first screen translation of a work by one Boston Teran, a prolific but pseudononymous scribe of popular page-turners. Those tome…
Read more »
Nikolaj Coster-Waldau on His Descent Into Darkness for 'God Is a Bullet'Coster-Waldau also spoke about reuniting with Nick Cassavetes and the unexpected romance subplot between his and Maika Monroe's characters.
Read more »
'No Hard Feelings,' 'Asteroid City,' 'God Is a Bullet' top new films this week'The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster,' 'Dhoomam' and 'The Perfect Find' are also landing...
Read more »
‘God Is a Bullet’ Review: Jamie Foxx and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau in Nick Cassavetes’ Brutal — and Brutally Silly — ThrillerMaika Monroe co-stars in this film about a cop who goes undercover in a murderous cult to find his kidnapped daughter.
Read more »