God Is A Bullet review: Jamie Foxx can’t save this revenge flick misfire
Nick Cassavetes' action film, co-starring Maika Monroe and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, is loaded with gratuitous violence and little else
Film Reviews Bullet
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
21 Comments
the soundtrack, which probably cost a pretty penny with songs from Bob Dylan, Jane’s Addiction, Parliament Funkadelic, and the Dead Boys,What? No Concrete Blonde???
Goddamn, but Johnette Napolitano is one of the best damn female rock names out there (see also: Suzi DeMarchi).
“he same problem Stephen King had with Jack Nicholson in The Shining”That sounds like a feature, not a bug.
one of the strangest shoe-hornings of stephen king, jack nicholson and the shining i’ve ever seen. the point was actually made less clear by the comparison.
The claim that it’s based on anything real is the strangest thing about it to me.I haven’t watched “The Old Man” but I believe Jeff Bridges plays an assassin in that. Perhaps Jeff Daniels would have been more against type?
Well now that this site has disliked it, it must be good enough to watch at home.
Loooooord this looks bad. If it weren’t for the threat of sexual violence and brutality (and, seriously, thanks for the heads up on that) it might even be fun to watch for a laugh.
“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.”I’m not sure if this is poking fun at the ever tightening social media standards about characters only being able to be played by people that exactly match their demographics, or an example of them.
I mean… It’d be amazing if there was a differently pigmented amputee actor who’s casting would have the ability to bring in the financing to help produce this movie, but… we all know that’s the world we don’t live in.We do now live in a world where actors aren’t allowed to play characters that are in any way physically different to them without people getting offended. We’ll hit a point when all these British actors won’t be allowed to do American accents.Jason Statham will put a wig on and get cancelled.In fact, Denzel needs cancelling for Book of Eli for fucks sake. Dude ain’t blind.Tom Hanks… Philadelphia… How did we let that slide?(I’m joking, but also scared that’s the point this shit is gonna end at…)
No joke. Tom Hanks never lived in Philadelphia.
The prick didn’t even serve in WWII.
It’s because of the vast swathes of the terminally fucked-in-the-head who cannot tell the difference between characters and actors, fact and fiction, who unfortunately now have a platform and the most strident, voluminous voices.
Not to mention all the animated anthropomorphic moves where the voice actors are all HUMANS! Disney is the biggest offender there.
Excuse me, should you even be commenting? I don’t believe you’re an actual hammer.
“I’m not sure if this is poking fun at the ever tightening social media standards about characters only being able to be played by people that exactly match their demographics, or an example of them.”
It is *definitely* not poking fun.
I love how this is literally just Satanic Panic: the Movie. Presumably it will be revealed that the daughter played Dungeons & Dragons and that’s what got her in this mess in the first place.
Naw, she found the reverse gear on the turntable when she was listening to Judas Priest.
“Jamie Foxx can’t save this revenge flick misfire”What an odd thing to have in the headline when there is literally *one* passing reference to Foxx in the review and that reference isn’t even praise, it’s just misguided whiny bullshit about casting.
It’s not surprising that Foxx couldn’t save the movie when the reviewer himself barely acknowledges that he’s even in the fucking thing.
“Nick Cassavetes, who also wrote the script based on a novel by Boston Teran, seems to be trying to make his David Fincher movie”There is literally nothing about this flick that sounds like it’s trying to be Fincher-esque. If anything this sounds like a stale leftover from the decade after Tarantino got big and people were making loud, obnoxious, hyper-violent action movies with a complete lack of understanding of what made Tarantino’s movies so good.
The closest to a Fincher movie that this sounds like is The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, which is barely a Fincher movie as much as it is an adaptation of a worldwide bestseller by a director who could really have used a hit at the time.
2:35:00? Bruh…
So instead of the tired old trope of “magical Black person guides white protagonist,” they went with “magical Black person with visible differences who is disabled guides white protagonist”? Cool cool. Progress.