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.

Not that guns aren’t fired — all kinds of shooting weapons, actually — or that the damage done to faces and bodies isn’t depicted with CGI-splotched frenzy and maximum Foley squishiness. 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. (“Based on a true story� is thrown in for good measure too, except the real source is crime author Boston Teran’s same-named novel.)

Nikolaj Coster-Waldau stars as rule-following detective Bob Hightower, ridiculed early on by a macho colleague (Paul Johansson) as an inexperienced “desk cowboy,� which makes the fact that second-half Bob, in avenger mode, can stitch his own gashed midsection with a stapler the perfect “take that� rejoinder to so office-centered an insult. Alas, something tells me Cassavetes wasn’t thinking along such tongue-in-cheek lines, because it’s not like binder clips, pencils and Post-its suddenly get deployed.

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Rather, it’s a Manson-style situation, so it’s, you know, serious. (Except when it isn’t.) When Bob’s ex-wife and her new husband are viciously slaughtered by tattooed Satanists who also abscond with his teenage daughter, the only help on offer comes from the cult’s lone female escapee, an ex-junkie in hiding named Case (Maika Monroe). She knows their operation and their tattoo guy (a why-are-you-here Jamie Foxx), and is ready to lead an undercover, correctly inked Bob right to psychotic ringleader Cyrus (Karl Glusman). Not backed up by the whole of law enforcement, mind you, because otherwise, there’d be no story, no slavering depictions of depravity, no waltz into the abyss and no righteous body count.

As it is, however, there aren’t any characters of lasting interest. 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, mostly they’re a schematically mismatched duo saddled with repetitive, hack-noir exchanges about faith, evil and mortality meant to shade their dangerous search with philosophical heft — too bad the only real question is, do you fight the devil with handsome do-gooders or sexy hard cases, or both?

Try as Coster-Waldau and Monroe might, their relationship mostly comes off as the laughably unperformable breather between episodes of cartoonish, screaming mayhem, plus a crammed-in, ludicrous subplot from back home about an abusive cop’s nothing-to-lose housewife (poor January Jones) that could be outtakes from an AI-assembled soap opera.

None of it is remotely tense, either, because Cassavetes, once a genre-hopping mainstay (“The Notebook,� “Alpha Dog�) who hasn’t helmed a feature since 2014’s “The Other Woman,� is on a showboating bender. 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. Whoa, OK. Maybe empty vengeance does beget more empty vengeance.