Displaying items by tag: Nikolai Coster Waldau

GOD IS A BULLET

US, 2023, 156 minutes, Colour.

Maika Monroe, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau. Karl Glusman, January Jones, Jamie Foxx, Paul Johansson, Ethan Suplee, Jonathan Tucker, Brendan Saxton III..

Directed by Nick Cassavetes.

A brutal film about brutal people and brutal events. And, with some philosophical dialogue at times, a central character who attends church, speculations about what is the presence of God in the world… And with so much death, the title.

The film was written and directed by Nick Cassavetes, son of John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands, his films range from The Notebook to Alpha Dog. The film is based on a well-received novel of 1999.

Many audiences will be repelled by the violence and, with a long running time, may not want to continue with the film. And, it requires concentration, especially from the opening and the abduction of a young girl to a Manson-like family, slaughter and abduction sequence. The cult group is repellent, led by Karl Glusman, a range of henchmen and young women in attendance, glimpses of satanic behaviour but no major explanations of the nature of the cult and its beliefs apart from brutality.

The main action concerns a detective, played by Nikolai Coster Waldau, whose daughter to whom he is devoted is abducted. He goes on leave, encounters a young woman in rehabilitation who has fled the cult. They join up to recover the daughter. The young woman is played by Maika Monroe and her intense performance might be the main reason for seeing the film.

Jamie Foxx turns up as an outsider, a tattooist, who puts a range of tattoos on the detective to make his mixing amongst the cult more credible. And, there is an extraordinarily lurid bar with a mix of very strange characters.

The audience has to pay attention to the main action, and what are flashbacks concerning the young woman, some memory flashbacks to the aetective and his daughter, but the continued pursuit, complicated by various identities, the young woman making as if she is rejoining the cult, the deals, and a range of confrontations and shootouts.

The scenario seem quite improbable, the fiction of so many action and bikie and cult films from the past. But, with the strange behaviour, conspiracy series, theories, and the ever-divided USA since the first Trump administration, it may not seem so improbable.