At The Movies: God Is A Bullet shoots blanks, Ruby Gillman: Teenage Kraken makes a splash

God Is A Bullet (M18)

120 minutes, opens on Thursday
2 stars

The story: Nikolaj Coster-Waldau stars as small-town detective Bob Hightower who takes matters into his own hands after a depraved cult slaughters his ex-wife and abducts his tween daughter. He infiltrates the satanists with help from a former member, Case Hardin (Maika Monroe).

American film-maker Nick Cassavetes was also Coster-Waldau’s director on the 2014 comedy The Other Woman.

To be clear: There is a total of zero laughs in their latest feature, the glum and grisly noir God Is A Bullet.

More indefensibly, this adaptation of Boston Teran’s 1999 based-on-true-events bestseller of the same title summons no urgency either for its revenge-and-rescue operation.

Hightower first visits a mysterious amputee (Jamie Foxx) to get tattoos for effective undercover.

He leaves looking exactly like himself but with ink drawings, and hits the road in his jalopy with Case.

He is a religious man and she is a nihilist, and the odd couple’s passage along the dusty New Mexico highways is as interminable as their late-night discussions on how God is a bullet.

Psst, detective, should you not cut the pseudo-existential pretentiousness and quickly go save your missing daughter?

The tattooed cultists under a psycho leader (Karl Glusman) – Case’s ex-lover, regrettably – are scumbags who leer, rampage, murder and rape. Cassavetes, to his credit, is unflinching in creating the seamy subculture where Hightower’s initiation meets the expected gratuitous violence plus a rattlesnake.

But no number of David Bowie and Bob Dylan on the soundtrack will make this exploitation picture the arty thriller Cassavetes seems to think it is. The script is so confused, it has five different endings, none arriving soon enough.

Hot take: Devil worshippers aside, nobody’s idea of a good time at the movies.

Ruby Gillman: Teenage Kraken (PG13)

91 minutes, opens on Thursday
3 stars

The story: As if puberty is not discombobulating enough, 16-year-old Ruby Gillman (voiced by Lana Condor) discovers she is a descendant of warrior kraken queens when all she wants is to fit in at Oceanside High and go to the prom.

DreamWorks Animation’s Ruby Gillman: Teen Kraken has a cute and likeable heroine in Ruby, and her self-discovery is a lively comic adventure that begins with the shy mathematics geek morphing into a giant kraken sea beast after falling off the pier.

Avoid the water is for this very reason her mum’s (Toni Collette) one lifelong rule. The Gillmans, including laid-back dad (Colman Domingo) and a little brother (Blue Chapman) – director Kirk DeMicco’s (Vivo, 2021) computer-animated characters have the cuddly tactility of claymation – camouflage as humans in the seafaring town of Oceanside.

But how is Ruby to conceal her blue tentacles and those gills she has for ears? “I’m a monster,” she bemoans, longing to be popular at school like her new bestie, the glamorous redhead Chelsea Van Der Zee (Annie Murphy).

Ruby is every teenage girl who feels she does not belong and that she is not even herself, what with her sudden bodily changes.

That said, only Ruby can lay claim to a Warrior Queen of the Seven Seas grandmother voiced by Jane Fonda.

The classic mythology has been reversed such that the krakens are now benevolent protectors of the oceans and mermaids are evil. Grandmamah trains Ruby in her new-found powers amid the bioluminescent aquatic depths.

And it is gladdening, watching the misfit grow into her royal destiny, allying with commanding Grandmamah and her princess mother against their ancient mermaid nemesis in a climactic tsunami battle.

Hot take: Release the kraken and embrace your true self. This voyage of matrilineal female empowerment is fun family entertainment.