Movie Review: 'God Bless America'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- The last movie from ex-standup comedian and budding director Bobcat Goldthwait was World's Greatest Dad, a thought-provoking dark comedy starring Robin Williams. It was savagely funny.
His latest, God Bless America, is also a dark comedy, and its skewering of American pop culture is similarly thought-provoking. But, unfortunately, it's a lot more savage than it is funny.
The ironically and sardonically titled God Bless America focuses on Frank, played by Joel Murray, an embittered everyguy who has recently been divorced, fired from his job, and informed that he may be terminally ill.
His frustrated existence at this point is characterized by his raging contempt for the dumbing down of American culture -- represented in microcosm here by the predominance of reality shows on television.
He buys a gun with the intent to take his own life. But why kill himself when he can kill others whom he blames for society's ills, thus ridding the world of at least some of the cruel, rude, stupid, obnoxious, repulsive, unscrupulous, and intolerant people he sees around him -- starting with several celebrated stars of reality TV shows?
These people, in Frank's world-weary eyes, deserve to die, and so he will serve as judge and jury before executing these executions.
He also takes on a willy-nilly accomplice, one Roxy, a teenager played by Tara Lynne Barr, and they take off across the country, embarking on this rampaging mission of selective population control.
Goldthwait (Shakes the Clown, Sleeping Dogs Lie) certainly taps into the current sense of dissatisfaction with the perceived epidemic of uncivil behavior that seems to be everywhere. But he overdoes it not only with the implicit level of intellectual superiority on display but with the upsetting and almost fascistic collateral damage that eats up everything around it and makes us resent and dismiss the film itself.
There's no denying the wish-fulfillment satisfaction that comes from the mere mention of many of the targets of Frank's indignation and ire. To pick one example that's close to home, he sets out to short-circuit inconsiderately disruptive behavior in a crowded movie theatre.
But even if we accept all the graphic violence, this satirical bloodbath, as metaphorical (which is the only way to process it if we are to find the film at all palatable), we eventually find ourselves disapproving just as strongly of the methods of the film itself as we do of most of the designated groups it rails against.
Ultimately, God Bless America is just an extended rant. And it becomes tediously repetitious in the late going.
True, it offers a string of admittedly deserving targets for derision, but we exit feeling that we've been watching nothing more than the shooting of fish in a red-white-and-blue barrel. By then, hopefulness has long since segued into hatefulness.
To say nothing of the glaring truth that what the protagonists do routinely here is far worse -- to understate the case to a ridiculous degree -- than what is done by the miscreants to whom they're meting out murderous punishment.
Murray (a brother of the famous Bill) is surprisingly effective in the lead, given the limitations of the material, but his performance gets lost, buried in the wrongheadedness of the central concept.
So we'll complain about 2 stars out of 4 for this over-the-top killing-spree comedy, God Bless America. File this one in the cure-is-worse-than-the-disease department.
