Without the main person – Weekend
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The gloomy crime drama by Nick Cassavetes “He is a bullet” is coming out on Russian screens. In order to make a truly memorable film, he lacked only a little imagination in the field of casting.
For the first time, the son of John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands, Nick, appeared on the movie screen at the age of eleven in Cassavetes’ Husbands, and then for another quarter of a century he starred in films that were quite unexpected for the owner of such a surname: erotic thrillers and action films like Blind Fury. The peak of his acting career was Sam Firstenberg’s Delta Force 3: The Killing Game. Probably, it was after this amazing action movie about a joint operation of American and Russian special forces, which also starred Chuck Norris’ son Mike, Kirk Douglas’ son Eric and Arthur Penn’s son Matthew, that Cassavetes Jr. first realized that he was quite capable of following in his father’s footsteps and moving to director’s chair (acting, however, did not stop), in 1996 he shot his first film “Unhook the Stars” with Rowlands, Depardieu and Marisa Tomei and almost immediately reached a quiet but decent level; if his debut participated in the competition of the international section of Kinotavr, then the next film, She is Beautiful (1997), already claimed the Palme d’Or at the Cannes competition. And in 2004, he turned out to be the creator of a real hit (although he later called it his worst creation more than once): the sugar-honey historical melodrama The Notebook with Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams not only was excellent at the box office, but, more importantly, , proved to be the perfect backdrop for girlfriends’ get-togethers and bachelorette parties, filling the same niche as Dirty Dancing 20 years before.
Using “He is a bullet” in this way is unlikely to work – this is not “Dirty Dancing” in any way. The script written by Cassavetes himself was based on the debut novel of the upcoming thriller maestro Boston Teran “God Is A Bullet” renamed at last). On Christmas Day 1995, satanic criminals who adhere to the demonic “left-hand path” kill the wife and kidnap the daughter of the provincial detective Bob Hightower (Nikolai Coster-Waldau). Disillusioned with the law, Bob quits the police force, buys two bags of firearms, covers his body with appropriate tattoos (Jamie Foxx as an unconventionally pigmented staker is perhaps the film’s most striking character in every respect) and in the company of former cultist and ex-junk Case (Maika Monroe ), the only one who at one time managed to escape from under the owl sectarian wings, goes in search of the leader of the heavily armed atheists Cyrus (Karl Glusman). Bob wants his daughter back, Case also wants something, but does not say.
In Teran’s novel, under the guise of a brutal thriller, critics found an inner relationship with the White Album by Joan Didion and The Searchers by John Ford. As for the film adaptation, it (or rather, “He”) inherits to the greatest extent the depressive and moralizing movie ballads of the mid-1990s about how fate brings together marginals and outsiders who are forced to deal with crime, addictions, moral trauma and skeletons in shrunken closets, ranging from Leaving Las Vegas by Mike Figgis to Bullet by Julien Temple. All this broth of torments is unevenly, but generously seasoned not so much with “combat” as with “scenes of violence”, sustained in the same nostalgic spirit: you can quit the Delta squad, but fire him from yourself … It turns out to be extremely worthy, but – really strong emotions (not to mention the slightest catharsis) what is happening does not cause. Moreover, the way to radically change the situation and make the picture truly memorable, soul-stirring and almost certainly doomed to become a cult, lies on the surface.
Cassavetes has co-starred with Nicolas Cage twice throughout his acting career (in John Woo’s Face Off and Zion Sono’s recent Prisoners of Ghostland), so casting him in the lead role would be an absolute win-win. The image of Bob Hightower clearly provides the artist’s “unbearable heaviness of enormous talent” with an excellent opportunity to show himself in all its glory. Lying with a mournful expression on his face with his back to his girlfriend, he, like no one else, is capable of since the time of the aforementioned “Leaving Las Vegas”, a confrontation with Satanists after “Mandy” it would also have gone like clockwork, and the child (and specifically the daughter) Cage has saved by now more than once. And as for the notorious “truth of character” (do not forget that the inconsolable detective is also deeply religious), expressed, including mimicry, then Cage cannot have any competitors at all. So if such a somersault of the casting really happened, the title of the film could, with a clear conscience, not be changed, but simply changed: the title of the production melodrama of the Mosfilm film studio in 1972 “A Man in His Place” would suit him perfectly. There Cage, by the way, would also play great.
In theaters from June 22
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