Jonny Numb

[155 minutes (may God forgive us). Unrated. Director: Nick Cassavetes]

I sometimes wonder what it must be like to be the child of a celebrity.

Some “nepo-babies” seem to have genuine talent, while others leave the world recoiling at their lack thereof. Perhaps it has to do with being the “baby” in general – mommy or daddy was the Success Story, which leaves baby in an awkward position: baby will never not be a household name, because mommy or daddy will always be household names.

This puts baby in a precarious spot – if he chooses to follow in mommy or daddy’s footsteps, he will always be in a position of trying to prove himself. As a result, he’ll never quite know if his artistic output is worth a damn because all that incoming validation is tempered with insincerity and people looking for a piece of you.

While Nick (son of Gena Rowlands and John) Cassavetes has been around a long time – acting in his father’s films as a child and directing his first in 1997 – something like God Is a Bullet makes me wonder just what his modus operandi is.

But mostly, I’m left pondering why guys like Cassavetes and Ben (son of Barry) Levinson can’t be more like the genuinely talented Oz Perkins (Gretel and Hansel; The Blackcoat’s Daughter).

But I digress.

I’m a great admirer of pulp, but can be very finicky when it comes to how said pulp is approached. God Is a Bullet begins badly, as a gang of heavily-tattooed cult members rape and murder god-fearing hero Bob Hightower’s (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) ex-wife and torture her new husband before murdering him, too. Oh, and his teenage daughter gets kidnapped in the process because that’s how these plots go. The sequence is callously stylized and cynically intended, with Cassavetes employing desperate shock value to grab the viewer’s attention.

Things get promising when Bob enlists cult escapee Case Hardin (Maika Monroe) to guide him on an improbable, Eight Millimeter-style descent into an underworld of drugs, face tattoos, sadistic violence, gross overacting, and pretentious Philosophy 101 platitudes.

For a stretch, God Is a Bullet turns into a road movie (complete with at least a dozen cringeworthy, country-twangin’ needle drops), and while Bob is a faith-based family man prone to victim blaming (“if you’d had a solid religious foundation, you might’ve turned out better”), he never comes across as the tough guy Cassavetes seems to be going for. Frankly, he’s lucky to be accompanied by Case, whose jaded-through-trauma character is the film’s sole redeeming trait. Monroe’s deadpan warble is utilized to great effect here, and her propensity for violence compelling, even if all of the bloodshed is presented in a showboating, ultra-slick, and ultimately gratuitous manner.

I’m no prude when it comes to violence in film, but my temperament tips over into annoyance when violence is presented weightlessly – a bunch of Michael Bay-styled flash over substance. That’s Cassavetes’ primary mode here – when Bob shotguns two scumbags at a party, it’s presented as extremity for extremity’s sake (thus negating any possible emotional impact). There’s lots of this shit in God Is a Bullet, and it gets progressively worse and more blatantly unbelievable as it lurches toward its climax (which rips off the anti-aircraft-gun massacre from 2008’s Rambo).

Oh, and there’s a scene where Bob gets bitten about a hundred times by a Rattlesnake, manages to chase and tackle the guy who put it in his truck, and somehow survives a ride of indeterminate length to get treated…and wakes up ready to crack some Satan-loving skulls the next morning.

“Inspired by a True Story,” my ass.

While loaded with nasty violence and an atmosphere of general unpleasantness, the film is similarly weighed down with nihilistic, fatalistic, and ultimately vague philosophy. Whenever Cassavetes de-escalates the gory gunplay to hone in on a one-on-one conversation between Bob and Case, it comes off as so much straining-to-be-deep posturing. These lame attempts at profundity actually make God Is a Bullet an even more edgelordy piece of shit, getting high off its own stinky, shock-value fumes.

Some directors are extremely adept at making violence hit with brutal impact without being showy, and better still when they make it thematically relevant. S. Craig Zahler’s filmography is full of nasty surprises (just check out “that scene” in Bone Tomahawk), but his writing is unpredictable enough to not telegraph the beats leading up to said violence. Meanwhile, Cassavetes is like the guy on the airplane who doesn’t realize just how deeply his elbow is buried in your gut.

Playing the more interesting character, Monroe is able to sell a standoffish attitude and worldview that’s been informed by the physical and psychological torture she’s undergone. Coster-Waldau, on the other hand, sticks out like a hammered thumb, left to utter lines about his faith in GOD and how much he loves his daughter (since there is clearly no other way to convey these things). Cassavetes doesn’t address anything with delicacy or subtlety – by making the dialog as literal as possible, God Is a Bullet is not only an ugly ride, but a condescending one, too.

Tonal discordancy is a huge problem here, with Cassavetes leaving much of the cast off the leash, resulting in some truly agonizing scenery-chewing. Worse yet, most scenes go on for far too long, building to crescendos that result in more gratuitous violence, or yet another actor breaking out in camera-mugging, semi-improvised hysterics. This is poison for a film that drags on for an hour longer than it should.

And I don’t know about you, but I tend to check out when getting lectured on religion and philosophy by idiots with inflated egos. This is Hardcore for the knuckle-draggers who bow at the altar of The Boondock Saints. It’s Green Room for douchebags. It’s one of the worst films of 2023.

1 out of 5 stars