Walking the line between Brick and Little Miss Sunshine, Vengeance is neither as funny nor as suspenseful as you want it to be. But it has a big beating heart on its sleeve and a pronounced sense of melancholy that feels familiar after the gauntlet of the past few years.
If life in the time of a pandemic has had an impact on our art, it has been to make us examine the nature of how we live and what we live for. BJ Novak, it seems, is not immune to this existential question. Vengeance, his feature debut as a writer and director, is not the first mediation on murder podcast culture — and certainly, his is the underdog to Steven Martin and Martin Short’s triumphant series — but it is the first glimpse of The Office funnyman as a triple-hyphenate in film after his success on the small screen and as an author. What this glimpse reveals is a creator consumed by connection and meaning.
Vengeance follows Ben Manalowitz, a radio host who aspires to create a smash hit podcast and fills his Brooklyn-based life with meaningless hookups and a quest for “the story.” He’s an idea guy, but, his editor (the always delightful Issa Rae) tells him, he’s not a people guy. He lacks the ability to connect the dots between the philosophical and what moves people. When he gets a call from the bereaved brother of a hookup he scarcely remembers, it becomes more difficult not to take her point.
To Texas we go, and the sleuthing begins. A bigger-than-life family featuring a boisterous Boyd Holbrook begins to pull Ben into their orbit — at first with the promise of the story, ultimately with the content of their character. The beats are familiar, almost those of a rom-com. But the stranger in a strange land with a twist of disaffected millennial angst slant brings a bit of freshness to the fore.
Vengeance feels like a first film. Not because it is poorly executed, but rather because it feels like ideas Novak has chased in circles over many years. Watching them come to fruition in a dark indie comedy is satisfying, if not electrifying. Come for the slickly cut trailer, stay to find out where Novak nets out on the question of substance in story and purpose in life.
Vengeance debuts in select theaters July 29, 2022.