God Bless America

Comedian Bobcat Goldthwait has made a name for himself writing and directing comedies with outrageous premises and unexpected depth.  Sleeping Dogs Lie was about a woman who had once blown a dog, but it was really about how we deal with the past with our significant others.  World's Greatest Dad was about a father who writes an eloquent suicide note after his son kills himself, but used this set-up to explore how we remember the dead.

God Bless America, by contrast, is pretty much exactly what it seems: a middle-aged man and a teenage girl going on a killing spree to express their outrage at America's moral degradation.  Frank loses his job on a bogus sexual harassment charge and soon learns he has terminal cancer.  With the help of a truly twisted teen named Roxy, he decides to use his newfound freedom to take down some of the best exemplars of America's celebrity-driven culture, sex-obsessed mores, and fear-mongering political culture.  Along the way he rants about Twitter and young people's insistence on taking pictures everywhere, the greatness of Alice Cooper and the horror that is Diablo Cody.  (As if the movie didn't have enough of a "Get off my lawn" vibe already.)

I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop in this film, for some sort of nuance or second layer to emerge.  But it never really happens.  The best Goldthwait can do is show some minor areas of disagreement between Frank and Roxy, like whether high-fives are an abomination (yes, really).  In this way he suggests that not everyone might agree on who deserves to be killed.  What an incisive point!

The inevitable closing monologue in God Bless America is just a restatement of a rant Frank gives early in the film.  There really is no deeper meaning or evolution to this film.  It's a stand up comedy rant masquerading as a movie, Taxi Driver for 10-year-olds.