The Hollywood Reporter recently reviewed that aew film from writer-director Nick Cassavetes, his first since 2014’s The Other Woman. Based on Boston Teran’s well-received 1999 novel, God Is a Bullet squanders its provocative premise with a ridiculously bloated running time (155 minutes, and you feel every one of them) and gratuitous violence that lends a cartoonish sheen to a story aspiring to gritty realness.
Despite its talented cast, who demonstrate a willingness to go for broke in their portrayals, the film comes across like a pretentious version of an ‘80s-era Charles Bronson actioner.
Bronson would have been perfect for the role of detective Bob Hightower (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), whose ex-wife and her new husband are brutally murdered by the members of a cult who seemed to have watched The Hills Have Eyes too many times.
In the early scene that seems intent on outdoing the similar sequence in Death Wish in its brutality, and succeeds handily, the deranged, heavily tattooed psychos also kidnap Hightower’s teenage daughter (Chloe Guy).
The hard-boiled Case and the upright Hightower make for strange bedfellows as they attempt to find out what the cult has done with his daughter. “Forget it, Bob, you’re strictly the missionary position,” Case tells him at one point, and she’s not talking about sex.
She also displays the sort of philosophical attitude expressed by characters in bad movies when she holds up a bullet and intones, “This is the ultimate life form, the great equalizer. This is God, coyote.”
