From the director of The Notebook, a sensitive, female-skewing all-timer of a love story, comes God Is A Bullet, in which every woman onscreen gets repeatedly punched, kicked, sometimes raped, or murdered by a shotgun blast. They’re not the only ones—ample shotgun shells and throat slashings rain down on the cartoonishly grotesque Satanists with upside-down crosses and “666” tattooed on their heads. Nick Cassavetes, who also wrote the script based on a novel by Boston Teran, seems to be trying to make his David Fincher movie, but he falls closer to S. Craig Zahler territory. Stretched out over two-and-a-half hours, this Death Wish-style revenge trip, which the pseudonymous author Teran dubiously claims is based on his life experience, stretches both the premise and the gratuitous nastiness too thin.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with stories that go this dark and dirty. Relentlessly grim and brutal movies like The Painted Bird and Irreversible, while divisive, are masterpieces of their type. Cassavetes, unlike his father, is not a person who excels at art movies, however. His instincts are much more commercial, but he seems to have abandoned many of them to make God Is A Bullet, without adding much to compensate except horror-movie levels of violence. Were this made as actual horror, that might work. Indeed, the first few times its characters get brutalized to the point of spitting out a tooth, it’s undeniably potent. But after a while, the full body tattoos and rattlesnake bites healing in a single day try one’s patience. Revenge thrillers should be lean and mean, unless they have more plot than “guy goes to find bad guys, finds them, gets revenge.”
Someone like Zahler, who more gleefully revels in this stuff, might have cast a Jeff Bridges or Nicolas Cage in the lead role of Bob Hightower, a desk detective and faithful Christian who gets in over his head when his ex-wife is raped and murdered, and his daughter abducted. Instead, Cassavetes gets Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Game Of Thrones), who has the same problem Stephen King had with Jack Nicholson in The Shining. Showing up onscreen unshaven and intense, he already seems like a man fallen. Plus, we barely see any interaction with his daughter or ex before they’re taken offscreen. We know Coster-Waldau can play dark, but we’ve rarely seen him play normal to contrast it.
After finding no leads, Hightower gets contacted by Case (Maika Monroe, stealing every scene she’s in), an escapee from the “Followers Of The Left-Hand Path,” a Satanic cult that embodies the worst imaginings of middle-American Christians. She has her own reasons for wanting the guilty parties busted—the fact that they renamed her “Head Case” surely doesn’t help—and she concocts a plan to get Bob undercover in her former crew’s circle. This involves getting full-body tattoos from an intermediary named the Ferryman, an amputee with vitiligo played by Jamie Foxx, because Hollywood seems defiantly unaware that actual amputees and differently pigmented people can act too. Fortunately, he’s a magic tattoo man whose handiwork never scabs.
Cassavetes’ pseudo-tough-guy dialogue is enough to make his father’s corpse cringe. “You’re a real clit-drier, Bob, you know that?” says Case to her new partner. “What is it, you cunt-parrot?” yells a bad guy before getting blown away by the woman whose face he broke. In fairness, Cassavetes may just be quoting Teran’s book, but he sure can’t sell it as anything but silly, like outbursts from 15-year-olds trying to prove they’re hard. The writer-director doesn’t only wallow in moral ugliness, but in most other aspects of the production; the soundtrack, which probably cost a pretty penny with songs from Bob Dylan, Jane’s Addiction, Parliament Funkadelic, and the Dead Boys, gets milked for all it’s worth. Every time a song punctuates a scene, the moment seems to run until the song is over, regardless of whether the story beat merits it.
There are brief moments when the story seems to have a both-sides point, as when Case tells Bob he has to have tattoos to infiltrate the cult, because her former church is “just as bigoted as yours.” But it’s dropped quickly—when Coster-Waldau proclaims, “We’re a small Christian community. We don’t have much in the way of deviant behavior,” it comes off ridiculous, and not in a good way. Which is the movie’s problem overall—it’s too silly to be serious, but it’s trying to be anyway, and it gets too ponderous to just have gory fun. Cut God Is A Bullet down to a tight 90 minutes, and it might at least consistently deliver the cheap thrills and nihilistic kick it only occasionally achieves.
God Is A Bullet opens in theaters June 23