Evaluation: The hack-noir of ‘God Is a Bullet’ is just one prolonged slog

Revenge is a dish served as also a lot of smeary, overcooked programs in “God Is a Bullet,” an exploitation slog about a cult kidnapping and a great man’s tumble into hell that at 2½ several hours does not quite comport with the expeditious promise of its title’s final term.

Not that guns are not fired — all forms of shooting weapons, actually — or that the damage done to faces and bodies isn’t depicted with CGI-splotched frenzy and highest Foley squishiness. But to get to that ostensibly cathartic violence 1 need to endure heaping helpings of turgid storytelling, wince-y performing and bruised-purple dialogue: Author-director Nick Cassavetes hopelessly smashes melodrama, grindhouse and faux Cormac McCarthy nightmarishness alongside one another only to arrive at a lumbering Frankenstein’s monster of a B movie. (“Based on a true story” is thrown in for superior evaluate too, other than the serious supply is crime writer Boston Teran’s exact-named novel.)

Nikolaj Coster-Waldau stars as rule-next detective Bob Hightower, ridiculed early on by a macho colleague (Paul Johansson) as an inexperienced “desk cowboy,” which will make the actuality that next-fifty percent Bob, in avenger manner, can stitch his own gashed midsection with a stapler the excellent “take that” rejoinder to so office-centered an insult. Alas, a thing tells me Cassavetes wasn’t thinking together these tongue-in-cheek strains, because it’s not like binder clips, pencils and Write-up-its out of the blue get deployed.

Somewhat, it is a Manson-style scenario, so it is, you know, critical. (Other than when it is not.) When Bob’s ex-spouse and her new husband are viciously slaughtered by tattooed Satanists who also abscond with his teenage daughter, the only enable on give will come from the cult’s lone feminine escapee, an ex-junkie in hiding named Situation (Maika Monroe). She is familiar with their operation and their tattoo dude (a why-are-you-right here Jamie Foxx), and is ready to guide an undercover, effectively inked Bob suitable to psychotic ringleader Cyrus (Karl Glusman). Not backed up by the entire of legislation enforcement, mind you, because usually, there’d be no tale, no slavering depictions of depravity, no waltz into the abyss and no righteous body count.

As it is, having said that, there are not any figures of lasting desire. Case is the embittered, thick-skinned trauma survivor to Bob’s straight-laced, God-fearing lawman. But as they make their way through a desolate Southwest of vice and wretchedness, mainly they’re a schematically mismatched duo saddled with repetitive, hack-noir exchanges about faith, evil and mortality meant to shade their hazardous look for with philosophical heft — way too poor the only actual problem is, do you combat the devil with handsome do-gooders or pretty tricky scenarios, or both of those?

Try out as Coster-Waldau and Monroe could possibly, their relationship mainly comes off as the laughably unperformable breather involving episodes of cartoonish, screaming mayhem, in addition a crammed-in, ludicrous subplot from again property about an abusive cop’s nothing-to-get rid of housewife (poor January Jones) that could be outtakes from an AI-assembled cleaning soap opera.

None of it is remotely tense, both, for the reason that Cassavetes, after a style-hopping mainstay (“The Notebook,” “Alpha Dog”) who has not helmed a function considering that 2014’s “The Other Girl,” is on a showboating bender. But it’s the way of thinking of somebody providing a ’90s hefty metal audio online video — foregrounding carnival scuzzballs, delighting in brutality, lights up a desert massacre with fireworks — as an alternative of a storyteller genuinely intrigued in the press and pull of a bleak criminal offense saga tipping toward irreversible selections.

And when he does hint at the legacy he believes he’s doing the job in, as in a shot framing Coster-Waldau’s silhouette in a dusty doorway a la John Wayne in “The Searchers,” your thought isn’t “Oh cool” or even “Nice check out,” but “Uh, no.” Funkadelic’s “Maggot Brain” is needle-dropped at 1 position, and you promptly want that gorgeously uncooked vintage slapped correct out of this wannabe-soulful soundtrack’s mouth. Whoa, Okay. Maybe empty vengeance does beget additional empty vengeance.