Vengeance

Grade: B

I like movies that touch on a variety of themes, genres, or beats. If every single one doesn’t resonate with you equally, you can cherry-pick which level to enjoy it on. Vengeance is a film like that. It contains numerous talking points about red state/blue state people, regional stereotyping, how everybody has something to say and wants to say it to the largest possible audience, and others. I, for one, appreciated it as an entertaining quirky crime mystery, with no shortage of comedy.

B.J. Novak (from The Office, Inglourious Basterds, and Saving Mr. Banks) writes, directs, and stars as Ben – a New Yorker writer and aspiring podcaster. He gets a call in the middle of the night from someone he’s never spoken to; Ty, from Texas, who tells him that his sister (Ben’s girlfriend) has died. They weren’t really a couple. Abby (short for Abilene, from Texas, see what they did there?) was just one of many women Ben hooked up with, and the family has misread the situation to think Ben and Abby were much more serious than they were. Ben decides to fly down to Texas for the funeral, and to start up a True Crime podcast – as they believe Abby was murdered, and he wants to investigate.

The family – who continuously misunderstand everything and think Ben and Abby were the loves of each other’s life – welcome Ben with open arms, and graciously take him into their home. They are a colorful endearing bunch, with the small-town familial charm of the locals in Doc Hollywood or While You Were Sleeping. Novak’s screenplay is so cute – almost too cute. It lacks the real-life believability a viewer comes to expect from a feature film, and would have instead made an ideal sitcom or play. Scenes transpire where two characters have dialogue and think they’re talking about the same thing, but they’re not. And there are cutesy comedic callbacks to punchlines we heard earlier. But at its best, it works wonderfully, and will supply audiences with “I like the part where…” conversations. The fish-out-of-water uncomfortableness Novak’s Ben displays reminded me of Ben Stiller’s Gaylord Focker in Meet the Parents. And to partially spoil one joke that worked, I got a kick out of the Whataburger through-line, and why they like going there.

I’ve never watched The Office, so I wasn’t that familiar with Novak, and I didn’t recognize most of the cast, but Ashton Kutcher does some of the finest work of his career as a long-haired, mustachioed recording engineer. Think Phil Spector as an easy rider – and he gets surprisingly profound when the script spoon-feeds him deep pontifications. Vengeance is interesting, ambitious, and eclectic fun. Novak is sharp and has a lot to say. If one day, he isn’t spread so thin with all the creative hats he wears, and can master tailoring his writing to the kind of medium it’s going to, I have a feeling he’ll knock one out of the park. And that’ll be a movie I look forward to seeing.

Grade: B