Review: The hack-noir of ‘God Is a Bullet’ is one long slog

Revenge is a dish served as too many smeary, overcooked courses in “God Is a Bullet,” an exploitation slog about a cult kidnapping and a good man’s tumble into hell that at 2½ hours doesn’t quite comport with the expeditious promise of its title’s last word. But to get to that ostensibly cathartic violence one must endure heaping helpings of turgid storytelling, wince-y acting and bruised-purple dialogue: Writer-director Nick Cassavetes hopelessly smashes melodrama, grindhouse and faux Cormac McCarthy nightmarishness together only to arrive at a lumbering Frankenstein’s monster of a B movie. But it’s the mindset of somebody selling a ’90s heavy metal music video — foregrounding carnival scuzzballs, delighting in brutality, lighting up a desert massacre with fireworks — instead of a storyteller genuinely interested in the push and pull of a bleak crime saga tipping toward irreversible decisions. And when he does hint at the legacy he believes he’s working 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 try,” but “Uh, no.” Funkadelic’s “Maggot Brain” is needle-dropped at one point, and you instantly want that gorgeously raw classic slapped right out of this wannabe-soulful soundtrack’s mouth.