Positioning himself as the satirist we both want and need right now, the ex-Office actor and writer BJ Novak certainly deserves points for his chutzpah. And while he deserved points for very little else in his misfiring anthology series The Premise, there’s a bit more to recommend in the murky new comedy thriller Vengeance, flashes of something that hint at a future project where the end product more closely resembles what he sees on paper.
For us it’s a stopgap until he gets there, an ambitious yet overstuffed attempt to tackle an exhaustive, button-pushing list of various slices of Americana, from true crime podcasts to coastal elites to gun control to opioid addiction to the cult of celebrity to hookup culture. It’s not quite as scattershot as his aforementioned show but one still wishes he’d thrown something out to lighten the load, an unwieldy film that never quite sinks but only just keeps its head above water. It’s a directorial debut and very much feels like it, the work of someone desperate to show us both sizzle reel and mission statement but the aim is too high and so the result is less “here’s what I can do” and more “here’s what I shouldn’t try to do”.
Novak plays an obnoxious New York journalist called Ben, shown in the first scene drinking on the roof of Dumbo House with his equally obnoxious friend, played by the singer John Mayer. In a too-obvious scene-setter, the pair share inane, self-assured observations about life, agreeing with each other on everything (“100%,” they keep chanting), an early sign that Novak prefers a hammer to the face when a tap on the shoulder would do. He then pitches a podcast to a nearby producer (Issa Rae) who tells him that he needs to be less thesis, more story and less head, more heart (advice that Novak himself would be smart to remember).
His search for something more substantial coincides with a strange call: his girlfriend is dead. Except he doesn’t have a girlfriend. Instead, the brother of a woman he hooked up with a few times is under the impression that they were more committed than they were and so he finds himself, with poorly justified reasoning, travelling to a small town in Texas to attend the funeral and meet her family. He then comes upon an idea, maybe trying to find out how she died could be the podcast pitch he’s been looking for.
It’s a bells-and-whistles update of the classic “cold-hearted city slicker is initially repelled but ultimately charmed by the small town he gets stuck in” comedy, Doc Hollywood with Twitter jokes. Novak, the Harvard graduate son of a celebrity memoir author, is hyper-aware of how someone like himself could easily write a patronising and untethered version of this story and so goes to great lengths to subvert expectations. The locals (including Ashton Kutcher, Boyd Holbrook, Succession’s J Smith-Cameron and the funny but underused Disney star Dove Cameron) are not the simplistic hicks his character thinks they will be (they know what Raya is!) and so we get a learning exercise about avoiding snap judgments. But these lessons aren’t quite as surprising and refreshing as he seems to think they are. Updating an age-old fish out of water setup such as this with the internet as an obvious influence makes the world immediately that much smaller and Novak’s character explaining what a writer does and what a magazine is pushes the culture clash into cartoonish territory. As he shifts from comedy to thriller, with a rather banal crime plot taking centre stage, I’m not quite sure if Novak knows what he wants to say with a film that clearly, desperately wants to say something.
Given the brutal boot camp training that is being in a network sitcom writers room for many years, it’s no surprise that Novak’s dialogue has a crisp efficiency to it and there are enough amusing moments to make one wish he would lower his sights a tad and try making something that’s more situation-based comedy and less of-the-moment satire. As a director, he’s mostly anonymous and as an actor, he’s rather listless, casting himself as the lead when he’s not quite got the natural charisma or, as things get weightier, dramatic chops for it.
When a writer-director of some undeniable talent throws so much at the wall, it’s inevitable that elements will stick and in Vengeance, there’s just about enough to make us curious to see what happens when Novak learns to tighten his focus. Vengeance is less the film we need right now and more the one he thinks we do but hopefully next time, he’ll figure out how to make something we want instead.
Vengeance is now out in US cinemas and in the UK on 7 October
