‘God Is a Bullet’ Review: Jamie Foxx and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau in Nick Cassavetes’ Brutal — and Brutally Silly — Thriller

Frank Scheck
·4 min read
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Revenge thrillers tend to be most effective when they’re lean and mean. Such is definitely not the case with the new film from writer-director Nick Cassavetes, his first since 2014’s The Other Woman. Based on Boston Teran’s well-received 1999 novel, God Is a Bullet squanders its provocative premise with a ridiculously bloated running time (155 minutes, and you feel every one of them) and gratuitous violence that lends a cartoonish sheen to a story aspiring to gritty realness. Despite its talented cast, who demonstrate a willingness to go for broke in their portrayals, the film comes across like a pretentious version of an ‘80s-era Charles Bronson actioner.

Actually, Bronson would have been perfect for the role of detective Bob Hightower (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), whose ex-wife and her new husband are brutally murdered by the members of a cult who seemed to have watched The Hills Have Eyes too many times. In the early scene that seems intent on outdoing the similar sequence in Death Wish in its brutality, and succeeds handily, the deranged, heavily tattooed psychos also kidnap Hightower’s teenage daughter (Chloe Guy).

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Stymied in his efforts to investigate the murders and track down his daughter by his department supervisor John Lee (Paul Johansson) for reasons revealed later in the story, Hightower finds an unlikely ally in reformed junkie Case (Maika Monroe, Watcher), one of the cult’s past members who managed to escape the clutches of its maniacal leader Cyrus (Karl Glusman, looking the part very convincingly). With her help and the addition of plenty of tattoos to make him look more convincing (but only a small, discreet one on the face, so as not to mar the actor’s leading-man looks), Hightower manages to infiltrate the cult, which also includes the mysteriously stoic one-armed figure known as “The Ferryman” (Jamie Foxx, letting his imposing physical presence make up for his lack of significant screen time).

The hard-boiled Case and the upright Hightower make for strange bedfellows as they attempt to find out what the cult has done with his daughter. “Forget it, Bob, you’re strictly the missionary position,” Case tells him at one point, and she’s not talking about sex. She also displays the sort of philosophical attitude expressed by characters in bad movies when she holds up a bullet and intones, “This is the ultimate life form, the great equalizer. This is God, coyote.”

Hightower is no slouch himself when it comes to toughness. In the course of his travails, he repairs a serious stab wound to his torso by using a stapler and manages to survive a rattlesnake bite and getting set on fire (not at the same time). Of course, the snake had reason to be ornery, since cult leader Cyrus had injected it with crank and waved it over his head like a lasso.

No one would expect a film like this to be decorous, but Cassavetes seems determined to rub the excessive violence in our faces as if inflicting punishment. The cult members murder outsiders and each other with the sort of abandon you’d expect in a snuff film, and one bullet to a woman’s face isn’t enough when at least a dozen can be fired. Rather than seeming like a realistic depiction of the cult’s ultra-violent brand of anarchy, the literal overkill comes across like cinematic desperation.

The dialogue isn’t much better. When one bad guy gleefully informs a would-be victim, “You’re all out of bullets, sweetheart,” it doesn’t take a seasoned film critic to figure out what’s going to happen next. And while it presumably stems from the source material, a convoluted subplot involving John Lee’s adulterous wife (January Jones, aiming for femme-fatale status) adds little to the story except excessive length.

God Is a Bullet proves effective in spots, largely due to the efforts of its committed actors, who demonstrate a willingness to go full-throttle in every hyper-violent sequence. And its arid desert locations certainly provide plenty of appropriately gritty atmosphere. But this exercise in brutal nihilism ultimately proves as empty as the inane philosophy that provides the film its title.

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