Nick Cassavetes’s God Is a Bullet begins with a bloodthirsty satanic cult laying siege to a suburban household. From the gruesome detail with which the campaign of rape and torture is depicted to the thunderous sound design and rapid clip of the editing, the sequence is an all-out assault on the viewer’s senses. And the rest of the film, which Cassavetes adapted from Boston Teran’s 1999 novel of the same name, follows suit.
When Detective Bob Hightower (Nikolaj Coster-Wadlau) arrives on the scene the next day, he finds that his ex-wife and her new partner have been gruesomely murdered, and his teenage daughter has been kidnapped. In true ’80s action-hero fashion, he quickly realizes that, given the bumbling official investigations into the crime, he’ll have to take matters into his own hands if he ever wants to see her again. Teaming up with a former cult member named Case Hardin (Maika Monroe), he heads off on a bloody mission to either recover or avenge his child.
Over the course of their quest, we see plenty more shootings and stabbings as Bob and Case track their prey through seedy night clubs and satanic lairs. The violence itself is always visceral, delivering plenty of pulpy thrills as faces are pulverized and limbs are blown away. But aside from the red stuff, the film is scarcely interested in what’s inside its characters.
Bob’s transformation from a mild-mannered, church-going lawman into a tattooed killing machine makes sense on a practical level—he’s a broken man with nothing left to lose—but it doesn’t resonate emotionally because we’re never given a sense of what made him take up religion, let alone the law. Similarly, the cult is led by a man named Cyrus (Karl Glusman), a figure who never appears either charismatic or intimidating enough to explain the devotion of his followers. Jamie Foxx makes a brief appearance as The Ferryman, a tattoo artist with a prosthetic arm and skin marked by vitiligo, but even he struggles to breathe life into a character who seems to have been written largely as collection of visual affectations.
At times, God Is a Bullet seems half-aware of its emptiness and overcompensates for it with a series of rambling, pseudo-philosophical monologues about life, death, and the meaning of it all. These musings are rarely profound, and even if they were, the sheer amount of them would likely deaden their impact. There are times when the film feels like being trapped in a room with a bunch of stoned teenage boys, right after they watched Fight Club for the first time.
These exhausting musings also help to pad God Is a Bullet to its two-and-a-half-hour runtime, dooming what could have been a bright future as a midnight-movie experience. The film has a grungy style to it, and Monroe’s performance is committed and compelling, but its litany of grisly violence followed by half-baked reflection is a bridge too far.
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