A kidnapping cult regrets making off with a detective’s daughter in this wearyingly unsavory movie.
I didn’t count the number of times a woman’s face is smashed — by a fist, a boot, a brick wall — in “God Is a Bullet,” Nick Cassavetes’s first feature in almost a decade. But the misogyny of the movie’s risibly sadistic villains is only one distasteful thread in this sleazy saga of rescue and revenge.
Adapted by Cassavetes from Boston Teran’s 1999 novel of the same name, the plot centers on Bob Hightower (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), a mild-mannered detective, as he searches for the child-trafficking cult that has murdered his ex-wife and abducted his daughter. Impassive behind a despairing mustache, Bob welcomes the foulmouthed assistance of Case (Maika Monroe), a battle-hardened cult escapee. Case possesses intimate knowledge of the gang’s degenerate leader, Cyrus (a crazy-eyed Karl Glusman), for whom she has sacrificed several teeth and most of her self-respect.
The searchers don’t have much of a plan, drifting through the dim rooms and dusty outposts where Cyrus and his acolytes might be found. Jamie Foxx, inexplicably named The Ferryman, is around to provide Bob with tattoos and ammunition, and an almost unrecognizable January Jones appears briefly as a sneering drunk whose pertinence remains vague — at least to anyone as numbed by the film’s viciousness as I was.
Coming in at an interminable 155 minutes, “God Is a Bullet” has a punishing implacability. The acting is workmanlike, the settings are often ugly and the special effects — especially a grisly stomach-stapling — can only be described as strenuously specific. For Cassavetes, this may be as far from “The Notebook” as he is ever likely to get.
God Is a Bullet
Not rated. Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes. In theaters.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
