When a Satanic cult murders his ex-wife and abducts his teenage daughter, small town detective Bob Hightower (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), more of a housecat than a badass lawman, must team up with Case Hardin (Maika Monroe), an escapee from said Satanic cult, to track them down and get her back. Along the way they acquire a lot of tattoos, kill some folks, and confront the savage void of humanity. So goes Nick Cassavetes’ latest film, God is a Bullet, based on the novel of the same name by mysterious pseudonymous author Boston Teran.
You’ve seen this opening countless times in an endless parade of Lifetime movies. It’s the day of the big wedding. Everyone is at the church. The handsome groom hangs out with his boys. The hunky best man struggles to put the finishing touches on his toast. The bride, radiant and ever so in love, looks into the mirror and gets cold feet. Even the title font and opening score scream this specific brand of light, fluffy, inoffensive made-for-cable romantic fare.
“Death is a disease,” begins writer/director Bomani J. Story’s The Angry Black Girls and Her Monster. “And if death is a disease, there’s a cure.” And that’s exactly what 17-year-old Vicaria (Laya DeLeon Hayes), her family and community indelibly marred by this blight, sets out to accomplish in this pressing, powerful modern interpretation of the Frankenstein story. Within the framework of this familiar narrative, Story spins a tale that, though we’ve seen before in many regards, is fresh and urgent and proves there’s still plenty of life in the corpse of Mary Shelley’s saga of the Modern Prometheus.
By the time you get to the third installment of a franchise, you often know what to expect. Sometimes that can be repetitive and stale, but when it comes to The Roundup: No Way Out, the sequel to 2022’s The Roundup, itself a follow up to 2017’s The Outlaws, the filmmakers know exactly what audiences want—star Ma Dong-seok punching dudes very, very hard and being droll and hilarious as he does—and delivers a substantial amount of that. And it is good.
