Vengeance

by Julian Spivey

Director: B.J. Novak
Starring: B.J. Novak, Boyd Holbrook & Ashton Kutcher
Rated: R
Runtime: 1 hour & 47 minutes

B.J. Novak’s directorial debut “Vengeance,” which is now streaming exclusively on Peacock after a theatrical run that began on July 29, had so much momentum going for it until it fizzled out by the end, or mostly because of its end.

Novak, who also wrote the screenplay, stars as Ben Manalowitz, a journalist for The New Yorker (which is multiple times hilariously mistaken by local Texans as New York Magazine) who’s looking for a big break via a podcast in the vein of the many true crime podcasts that have become popular over the years. He stumbles upon one when he gets a tragic call from Texas that he doesn’t quite understand at first. Ty Shaw (Boyd Holbrook) calls Ben late one night to tell him his girlfriend, Abilene (Ty’s sister), has died. The problem is she’s not Ben’s girlfriend, merely a former hook-up, but the Shaw family believes the two to have been very close.

Ben flies down to Texas for the funeral and gets roped into a revenge plot by Ty, who believes his sister has been murdered by a cartel member. Ben agrees to tell the story as a podcast (the working title “Dead White Girl” is hilarious).

Ben becomes close with the Shaw family – mother Sharon (J. Smith-Cameron), sisters Kansas City and Paris (Dove Cameron and Isabella Amara), brother Mason or “El Stupido” as he’s affectionately called (Eli Abrams Bickel) and grandmother Carole (Louanne Stephens). He’s also making ground on his story, which includes interviews with record producer Quinten Sellers (Ashton Kutcher) a smart, big city-schooled Texan who helped record Abilene, a singer-songwriter, and Sancholo (Zach Villa) the gang banger whom Ty believes killed his sister via a drug overdose.

There are a lot of laughs in “Vengeance” and most of them have to do with the big city writer Ben being a fish out of water in rural Texas, but I don’t believe the movie ever really pokes fun at small-town country folk. In fact, Ben is trying to show how folks have more in common than not (which is a storyline I’m kind of tired of at the moment).

“Vengeance” is strong for most of its one hour and 47-minute runtime, but unfortunately unravels quite a bit in its final minutes when Ben figures out the culprit behind Abilene’s death and acts, after quite the showdown between the two, in a manner that I didn’t feel was natural for his character, but certainly fit in with the title of the movie.