‘God Is a Bullet’ Review: Nihilistic Revenge Thriller Doesn’t Believe in Anything — Including Plot
A movie about a pair of unlikely friends teaming up to infiltrate a cult is always going to rest on two things: the friends having chemistry and the cult being interesting. You’d really prefer to have both of those elements working for you, but a filmmaker can get by as long as one of them is strong. Unfortunately for everyone involved, “God Is a Bullet” has neither.
Nick Cassavetes’ adaptation of Boston Teran’s novel of the same name is an ambitious mess that features wild highs (a snake doing meth!) and impossibly dull lows (most everything else). Overly long and gratuitously violent, the bloated revenge thriller seems obsessed with reminding us of how much evil is in the world without showing the slightest bit of interest in explaining how it got there.
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The one thing everyone in Detective Bob Hightower’s (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) life can agree on is that he’s not particularly useful. His colleagues at the police department might respect his work ethic, but they ultimately dismiss him as a “desk cowboy” and a “seat warmer” who shouldn’t be trusted with any real cases. His ex-wife and her new husband ridicule him and largely keep him out of his teenage daughter’s life. The only things going for him are his deep faith in God and his belief that bad things don’t happen in his small Christian town.
The latter belief is shattered — and the former seriously tested — when he goes to visit his daughter Gabi (Chloe Guy) on Christmas morning and finds the house ransacked with several dead bodies left inside. His ex-wife is dead, and his daughter is nowhere to be found. Convinced that the absence of a body means that Gabi is alive somewhere, he opts to throw every police resource he has at finding the guys who took her.
His research leads him to Case Hardin (Maika Monroe), a reformed drug addict who escaped a cult of tattooed child traffickers who kidnapped Gabi. Her off-the-record testimony confirms that all of the evidence left at the house points to them, but Bob’s supervisor John Lee (Paul Johansson) prohibits him from investigating the case in a formal manner. When Case shows up at his doorstep and says that the only way to find Gabi is to work outside the law, he agrees to cross over to the dark side and hit the road with her. Case is as blunt and cynical is Bob is reserved, but the odd couple decides to bring his daughter back or die trying.
She introduces him to a shady dealmaker known only as The Ferryman (Jamie Foxx), a power broker with vitiligo who hooks the strait-laced cop up with the fake ID and tattoos that he’ll need to infiltrate a Satanic death cult. The encounter gives us our first real look at main obstacle that could impede this rescue mission: these motherfuckers are scary. But while we spend plenty of time exploring the cult’s sadistic tendencies and complicated tattoos, there’s never enough mythology to justify how long we spend watching Bob and Case’s meandering journey into the guts of the organization. Evil for evil’s sake only gets you so far.
Despite a premise that could have been ripped from a generic Liam Neeson vehicle, the film keeps drifting into wannabe Nicholas Winding Refn territory and forcing us to sit through endless scenes of sad people chilling in neon-tinged bars with evil vibes. A tighter edit that prioritized the rescue plot over meandering character development probably could have turned “God Is a Bullet” into a fun airplane movie, but Cassavetes’ arthouse ambitions always resurface at inopportune times. There’s definitely a market for the kind of straightforward thriller that “God Is a Bullet” seems to want to be, but there was absolutely no reason for this story to take two and a half hours.
If it wasn’t clear from the title, much of that running time padding is devoted to nihilistic screeds about how nothing matters. In the film’s worldview, organized religion and satanic death cults are just two sides of the same coin. They’re both clubs that suckers get duped into joining as a way of deflecting their anxiety about death and the endless void that follows.
The only thing that actually has the kind of power that we like to ascribe to deities is — you guessed it — a bullet. The intention may have been Cormac McCarthy-style poetry, but the script only delivers heavy-handed preaching that continues to pull us away from what’s left of the story. By the time the inevitable bloody climax arrives, it’s hard to care about anyone’s fate when the film has spent so much time trying to rid us of natural human emotions. Say what you will about the tenets of formulaic screenwriting, but at least it’s an ethos.
Grade: C-
“God Is a Bullet” opens in theaters nationwide on Friday, June 23.
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