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
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.