Review of the film “He is a Bullet” by Nick Cassavetes

Nick Cassavetes’ God Is a Bullet is an old-fashioned action thriller about a battered cop who goes through the seven circles of deep America’s hell in search of his kidnapped daughter. The movie’s synopsis sounds like a sweet nostalgic reminder of the simple yet effective action movies of the 1990s, but its execution Julia Shagelman disappointed.

Somewhere in the middle of the film, its main characters are Detective Bob Hightower (Nikolai Coster-Waldau), whose teenage daughter (Chloe Gay) has been kidnapped, and a young wildcat named Case Hardin (Maika Monroe), who volunteers to help him find her, and at the same time trying to deal with her own demons, she brings, as it should be in any road movie, into a round-the-clock diner “in the middle of nowhere.” There they continue the discussion that was interrupted about faith and the meaning of life, which runs like a red dotted line through the whole picture: the fact is that Bob is a deeply believing Christian, and Case, who drank violence and all sorts of horrors in her youth, does not believe in anyone or anyone. What. Although by this moment Bob is already slowly beginning to be disappointed in his faith, the girl decides to finish him off and delivers a thoughtful monologue (of which there are even more in the film than scenes of bloody showdowns). After showing his partner a bullet pulled out of the barrel of a pistol, Case explains that she is the god who equalizes everyone in front of his face and makes no exceptions for anyone.

In fact, the original title of the film is “God is a Bullet,” just like the 1999 Boston Teran novel that inspired the script (and the writer may have borrowed the title from Concrete Blonde, written ten years earlier). In our box office, all the references disappeared along with the meaning, albeit not very original, and with them – 35 minutes of running time. This, however, is not a purely Russian story: in such a truncated form, the picture is being played in several other countries. Perhaps it is precisely because of these gaps that she looks so sloppy and incoherent, but the remaining two hours lead to the disappointing thought that this is her immanent property and that the distributors even gave the audience a gift, reducing the time they have to spend with the characters of “…bullets” .

Moreover, about two-thirds of these characters are members of a satanic sect, led by a natural psychopath named Cyrus (Karl Glusman). It is they who, on Christmas Eve, break into the house where Detective Hightower’s ex-wife lives with her new husband, kill them both, and take their daughter away in an unknown direction. The sheriff’s office, Bob believes, is not investigating diligently enough, but he – in the words of the boss, an “office cowboy” who knows only how to shift papers – is not allowed to interfere. But then Case appears on his doorstep, having read about the kidnapping in the newspapers. Once, Cyrus herself and her comrades were stolen from the parking lot of a supermarket, after which she spent a dozen terrible years in a sect and escaped by force. She offers Hightower her help, but for this he must forget all divine and human laws and follow her path.

The first stop along the way is the house of a one-armed tattoo artist (Jamie Foxx in a small but colorful role), covered from head to toe in tattoos, like Case herself and all members of the sect. In the same way, he decorates Bob – theoretically so that he can pass for his own among the marginalized. But given that in the future our hero does not even try to disguise himself, in practice this is only necessary in order to add brutality to Coster-Waldau, although he already has more of it than a boring bureaucrat needs. At the same time, Bob and Case buy a military arsenal from a tattoo artist, in which only ballistic missiles are missing, and go straight to Cyrus’s lair on the US-Mexico border.

Judging by some stylistic and script decisions, Nick Cassavetes conceived an old-school action movie in the spirit of, say, Tony Scott’s “Revenge” (1989), in which men are harsh and laconic, women are broken, but not broken, there is nowhere to put samples on the villains, blood flows like water , and an ordinary guy, just like everyone else, is ready at a critical moment to endure a fight with an entire organized crime group. He ended up with an almost caricatured horror story for conservative America (for conservative Russia, perhaps, it’s also suitable), in which tattooed Satanists – some of them of not quite distinct gender – roam the peaceful neighborhoods, kidnap innocent girls, corrupt them and put them on drugs . At the same time, Cyrus and the company no longer look like criminals, but either Mad Max cosplayers, or fans who have gathered for a Marilyn Manson concert, so it’s absolutely impossible to take them seriously, just like the philosophical dialogues between Bob and Case.

By the decisive battle between good and evil, almost at the end of the picture, the last hints of harsh realism leave her, and Bob and Case turn into superheroes. There is only one consolation: unlike other superhero stories, this sequel definitely does not shine.