It may seem a bit odd at first glance for the director of The Notebook to be behind a gritty cop-vs-cult thriller. But then again Nick Cassavetes did also make 2006’s bleak kidnapping crime drama Alpha Dogs, so God Is a Bullet’s nasty descent into Satanic outlaw hell does have precedence. Cassavetes’ latest juggles grisly revenge and shattered faith against an urban underbelly backdrop, but that can only go so far opposite a pace and plot that creeps between effective moments.
Such turgid pacing comes later though. God Is a Bullet erupts with a nasty bang of an opening, as a late-night home invasion leaves Bob Hightower (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau)’s ex-wife slaughtered and his daughter taken. The bloody aftermath hollows Hightower into a man willing to recover his loved one at any cost and he finds the perfect partner in Maika Monroe’s Case, the cult’s only escapee and a woman equally desperate for her own vengeance. The ensuing two-and-a-half hours unfolds like Schrader’s Hardcore by way of S. Craig Zahler: another faith-shattered father descending into societal fringes to find his lost girl, only with way more exploded heads, slit throats and tatted-up psycho cultists.
As a pulpy paperback road trip through a crime abyss fraught with gruesome action and odd encounters (does Jamie Foxx as a hook-handed exile with connections count?), God Is a Bullet is a rare sprawling crime saga that does feel like a doorstopper transmuted into film. Coster-Waldau and Monroe play their roles with conviction, energizing a cliched dynamic of out-of-depth father and hardened survivor. Monroe gets the meatier part here, as her hunt for revenge against cult leader Cyrus balances cunning depths and seething intensity. Unfortunately, outside of a fun Jonathan Tucker as the cult’s shock-blonde wildcard, the same praise can’t be said about the film’s generic villains. At least they die well though; Cassavetes assembles some gnarly eruptions of ultraviolence: never gratuitous, spaced out enough to be impactful, but splattering the screen with stark gory brutality as Hightower and Case carve, slice and shotgun their way to answers about the kidnapped daughter. Not for the squeamish; bodies and limbs get shredded when this movie decides to get vicious.
As a journey of tested faith and forged friendship, God Is a Bullet can only trade in boilerplate plotting that reduces everyone to their most cliched state. The pace creeps listless between bland brooding drama and those moments of hard bloodshed, piling on underdeveloped tertiary characters that bloat what could’ve been a focused revenge odyssey. As much as bloodlust is satisfied by the final act, the grand confrontation between father, survivor and gang resorting to such a conventional guns-blazing finish can’t help but seem underwhelming.
God Is a Bullet is carried by its pair of strong leads, surprisingly effective action and an unflinching willingness to get grisly, grim and gory as characters descend down a sadistic rabbit hole. When it seeks to delve deeper thematically or philosophically, the attempts come across as hollow but as a sprawling genre film blending road trip and revenge, Cassavetes’ crime-action-horror fusion has bite.
Photo courtesy of Wayward Entertainment
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