Movie Review: 'God is a Bullet'

God is a Bullet (2023)

Directed by Nick Cassavetes

Written by Nick Cassavetes

Starring Maika Monroe, Nikolaj Coster Waldau, January Jones, Jamie Foxx

Release Date June 23rd, 2023

Published June 22nd, 2023

God is a Bullet is an unrelentingly grim, gross, exercise in ugliness. Written and directed by Nick Cassavetes, directing with all of the artful subtlety of a sledgehammer, God is a Bullet pretends toward being a serious investigation of the horrors of human trafficking. In reality, God is a Bullet is an idiots notion of what a serious movie about a serious topic should look like. Imagine an Adam Sandler style director trying to make their version of Soderbergh's Traffic and you can get a sense of how ungodly stupid God is a Bullet truly is.

God is a Bullet stars Nikolaj Coster Waldau as Bob Hightower, a Police Officer somewhere in the United States. Though we are told by other characters that Bob is a desk jockey, and not a particularly good cop, Bob doesn't look like a guy who eats donuts all day. Indeed, one scene in the movie shows badass Bob gluing himself back together after a severe stab wound, showing off not only how stupid he is for not going to a hospital, but also washboard abs that your average gym rat would envy. Kind of defeats the purpose of saying he's an everyman when he's got the abs of your average professional wrestler.

Anyway, that's not an important point. God is a Bullet finds Bob having to track down a Satanic cult that has kidnapped his teenage daughter and murdered his ex-wife and her new husband. Bob is aided in his search by a former member of this Satanic Cult, Case Hardin (Maika Monroe), who narrowly escaped with her life before winding up at a rehab facility. Case agrees to help Bob find his daughter out of the guilt she feels for having helped kidnap other young girls like Bob's daughter.

It's actually never stated directly that this is a human trafficking ring. The cult seems to kidnap teenage girls and force them into sex work and drugs until they are either new members of the gang or dead. It's an odd business model to say the least. It's also the kind of pointless fear-mongering silliness that went out of style in the 80s when Charles Bronson turned into a parody of himself. Writer-Director Cassavetes appears desperate to recapture the spirit of Bronson's violent revenge fantasies though he makes no case whatsoever why such a revival is a worthy pursuit.

Bronson movies like like the Death Wish sequels and 10 to Midnight are trashy exploitation movies made by mercenary studios chasing dollars from a terrified right wing populace. Cassavetes taking that genre and trying to take it seriously creates a cognitive dissonance that I can hardly begin to describe. God is a Bullet is a conceit right out of late 80s reactionary action movies and that anachronism is never commented upon, it's merely earnestly presented as if it weren't an idea that needed to be left in the trash bin of film history.

God is a Bullet is a movie where masculine postures stand in for actual characters. The film tries to justify violence against Monroe's character because she's a tough chick who can take it. Thus we are forced to watch Monroe be repeatedly abused, having her nose broken, and her teeth kicked in because it supposedly makes her look tough. That's how it is intended to be taken but in practice, as clumsily and awkwardly directed by Nick Cassavetes, the repeated abuse of Monroe's character borders on some kind of ugly kink.

God is a Bullet is a punishing two and a half hours of scenes where women are degraded, kicked, punched, sexually assaulted and exploited. And, in classically 80s exploitation movie fashion, all of the abuse is used to motivate one mediocre guy to action. Nothing against Nikolaj Coster Waldau, he's not a bad actor at all, but he's merely being subjected to God is a Bullet. He's as much of a victim of this nasty, silly, dimwitted movie as anyone else trapped within Cassavetes' nonsense conception of a tough guy crime drama.

I want to highlight one of many very dumb scenes in this terrible movie. The main baddie takes out a gun and shoots a member of his gang in the head a ludicrous number of times. It's The Simpsons' Rake Gag of movie shooting scenes. It lasts for ages as the victim stands there taking bullet after comically CGI'ed bullet to the head. Finally, after emptying an entire clip full of bullets into his victim's head, the baddie puts his gun in his waistband.

This is the kind of dimwitted detail that demonstrates how silly God is a Bullet is. No one in the movie thought for a moment that a gun that had just been fired an ungodly number of times might be hot to the touch? Basically, the main bad guy, in order to look action movie toug,h just inflicted himself with third degree burns to his crotch. I have never fired a gun in my life and I understand the basic concept that gun barrels get hot when fired.

It's dumb and it's a nitpick but that detail is just, for me, emblematic of how tragically misguided all of God is a Bullet is. For a director with more than 20 years of experience, and the son of a directing legend for that matter, God is a Bullet is an embarrassing mess of a film. In a hapless desire to not remain best known for having directed The Notebook, Nick Cassavetes has directed a movie so toxic in its masculine posturing that it is downright poisonous. Nick, there are worse things than being known for directing The Notebook. For instance, people might one day remember that you directed God is a Bullet.

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