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”.
