‘God Bless America’ Red-Band Trailer Plays Out Fantasy of Murdering Every Annoying Person and Pop Culture Entity
Like an angry stand-up monologue merged with a bored night of Grand Theft Auto, Bobcat Goldthwait’s God Bless America goes on a lengthy rant about how annoying things are (man, don’t you just hate reality show stars, and when people talk in theaters?) but quickly devolves to just seeing how many people can be lackadaisically murdered before the cops stop all this lazily-vengeful shooting.
Reuniting increasingly misanthropic writer/director Goldthwait with a Scrooged and One Crazy Summer co-star, the film stars Joel Murray as a man who, like so many of us, gets pretty depressed by a lot of the crap he sees on television. When he finds out he’s terminally ill, Murray first decides to kill himself and finally be free from the late night programming he so hates, but then reconsiders and decides to instead shoot everyone else who is obnoxious and/or has a reality show, ultimately building to a scene in which an American Idol surrogate becoming the site of a lighthearted mass murder. A like-minded, blood-thirsty teenage girl also joins Murray in his jerk-murderin’ killing spree, amounting to an end product that seems to want to do a pop culture satire take on Falling Down but instead comes across as more of a straight-to-video Paper Moon sequel by way of a junior high school notebook scribbled with notes on how everyone and everything is stupid and should die:
I have no problem with senseless violence and accurately calling out the state of things as terrible, but doesn’t this all seem just a little too obvious in its gruesome fantasy fulfillment? Besides, everyone knows that when you suspect you have a terminal illness, you don’t go shooting up the place. You go on a madcap vacation and find love, like Tom Hanks and Queen Latifah did.
