Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Vengeance’ on Prime Video, a Consistently Funny and Insightful Satire from Director/Writer/Star B.J. Novak

After brief runs in theaters, on demand, and then on Peacock, B.J. Novak’s Vengeance lands on Prime Video so it can cozy on up right next to The Office, which is exactly where you know Novak from. The dark satirical comedy is his debut feature as a writer-director; he also stars as a New York City journalist and wannabe podcaster who finds himself in what Ned Flanders might call a dilly of a pickle: Rural Texas, where big-city snobs like him make their way through every situation awkwardly. He’s there investigating a murder, sort of – it’s a complicated story, perfect for the type of podcast that could make him famous.

VENGEANCE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: A woman takes her final breaths in a godforsaken field as oil derricks pump in the background. It’s dark. It’s late. She tries to dial her phone. The light stays on, a dot in a vast, empty space. Then it blinks off. Cut to New York City, where Ben Manalowitz (Novak) has a highly aggravating conversation with his buddy John (John Mayer). Aggravating not to them, but to us, since they’re as shallow as an ant’s foot bath. Ben has fling after fling after fling with women. He never seeks commitment. He laughs at rubes who might, you know, meet someone and settle down like grade-A morons. He writes for the New Yorker, and pitches podcast ideas to his radio-producer friend Eloise (Issa Rae). She shoots him down – she says his pitches are all ideas and no heart, which bullseyes Ben’s personality.

Then he gets a phone call. An aggrieved voice tells him, “your girlfriend is dead.” Funny, he doesn’t have a girlfriend – or he’s had too many, maybe. He files them in his phone not under their real names, but with silly nicknames that would surely make them upset if they knew about them. One of those was Abilene Shaw (Lio Tipton), a smalltown Texas girl with a wonderful singing voice who tried to get people to hear it in New York City. She “hung out a few times” with Ben, but moved back to the land of pumping oil derricks and died there. Opioid overdose, they say. And that’s her brother Ty (Boyd Holbrook) on the phone, breaking the news to someone who could almost give half a crap about this poor woman. It seems that Abilene made much more emotional hay from the fling than Ben did. Somehow, Ben allows Ty to convince him to fly in for the funeral. Where, exactly? Five hours from the city that’s three hours from Dallas. Great.

Ben fakes his way through the service – awkward. Hangs out with Ty and the gun rack in his truck – also awkward. Ty doesn’t believe his sister overdosed: “She wouldn’t touch an Advil.” He thinks she was killed, so how about he and Ben find out who did it and avenge her death. Ben’s reply: “I don’t avenge deaths. It’s not who I am.” He doesn’t believe Ty’s theory anyway, and chalks it up to grief and delusion. But then, a light bulb. Ben calls Eloise, pitches her a new podcast idea, about rural types who can’t accept difficult truths so they concoct their own narratives to explain them. The exchange goes like this:

Eloise: Dead white girl?

Ben: Holy grail of podcasts.

So Ben hangs back in Texas, staying with Abilene’s family – mom Sharon (J. Smith-Cameron), sisters Paris (Isabella Amara) and Kansas City (Dove Cameron), Granny Carole (Louanne Stephens) and brother El Stupido (Eli Bickel) – yes, El Stupido. That’s what they call him. He’s nine years old. The Shaws have many, many firearms; even El Stupido has his own 9mm. Ben doesn’t have a gun. He has a pour-over coffee dripper, though. Ben fishes around for stories about Abilene/episodes for his podcast, interviewing folks who knew the Dead White Girl, e.g. local music producer Quentin Sellers (Ashton Kutcher), who, considering how he talks, apparently has a Ph.D. in philosophy. Ben tries too hard to fit in; Ben goes to his literal first rodeo; Ben learns that actually getting to know people as individuals allows them to wiggle free from all those easy stereotypes.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Vengeance has a lot in common with Irresistible, which is also a political satire/directorial debut from a high-profile funny guy (Jon Stewart), starring a cast member from The Office (Steve Carell) and one from That ’70s Show (Topher Grace). A winning formula every time, it seems!

Performance Worth Watching: Is this Kutcher’s most convincing acting performance ever? Yes. Yes it is. Novak’s witty script gives Kutcher many interesting things to say, and he shows significant command presence when he’s on-screen.

Memorable Dialogue: Ben: “Paris, you accusing someone of cultural appropriation is cultural appropriation.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: There’s two directions satires like this usually take: They’re either relentless at the start, but eventually segue into earnestness so we don’t wholly detach emotionally from the characters. Or they maintain the biting tone and as the credits roll, we realize we’ve just watched a movie entirely populated by a-holes. With Vengeance, Novak manages to find a place where the twain shall meet – not always comfortably, mind you, but it at least upends expectations, and delivers many laughs with crisp comic timing.

Novak crafts an equal-opportunity satire that avoids the thornier components of modern political division (the Trump-word is never invoked), so criticizing him for both-sidesism isn’t quite on-base. The Red Staters may be gun-happy folk who can’t quite articulate their love of Whataburger, but Novak’s Ben is a smug fast-lane quasi-intellectual who’s a little bit shocked to be the recipient of the Shaw family’s kindness, which may just reveal a streak of self-loathing within him. The stereotypes are exploited more for comedy than commentary. Ben’s in Texas purely to exploit these yokels for their pain and conspiratorial delusions, and therefore paint a portrait of the Modern American Quandary: cultural division, the opioid epidemic, art and tech, etc., all the stuff that’s bringing the melting pot to a dangerous rolling boil.

Novak tackles all that and then some, and can’t quite get his arms around it all. Then again, who can? It comes at us hard and fast and from all angles every day. At first he seems to be landing on a banal can’t-we-all-just-get-along assertion, but then veers into more challenging and complicated territory. Cheers to Vengeance for its comic and thematic ambitions, even if they don’t quite reach a singular point. But I run the risk of being an apologist by saying that may be by design – in one scene, Ben says, “I’m especially good at drawing thematic connections between seemingly disparate elements and using that to illustrate a larger point or theory,” which isn’t just very funny in its skewering of condescending points-of-view; it’s also the film’s thesis statement. Ben’s grandiose quest is folly. Trying to make sense of it all makes no sense at all, it seems.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Vengeance shows Novak is a skilled and insightful satirist.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.