Vengeance

"Vengeance" is a standout feature directorial debut for B.J. Novak that exposes an America broken by disconnection.

He's a filmmaker to watch. Novak digs deep beneath the glib surface of his mystery thriller to find a responsive empathy aching to get out. Though Ben enjoys his job as a Manhattan journalist, he aspires to that 21st-century Holy Grail -- podcasting. Not when there's a shared humanity to lay bare. -- who can articulate and exploit the dangerous implications of America's divide. I cite these credits to indicate that Novak is impossible to classify.

NPR's Rachel Martin talks to actor B.J. Novak about starring in the new movie Vengeance. He also wrote the film's screenplay and made his directorial debut.

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Vengeance is now out! Is Vengeance streaming on Netflix? We shared where you can watch the mystery-comedy film right here.

To find out if there are screenings near you and to buy tickets, you can check out the movie’s official website. We recommend checking out the Netflix original movies Murder Mystery and Handsome: A Netflix Mystery Movie. Sorry to Bother You is another good option. Sadly, the mystery comedy is not available to stream on Netflix. However, there’s a possibility it could in the future if Netflix acquires licensing rights. There are many screenings of the film around the country. Vengeance is a movie written and directed by B. J. Novak. He also executive produced and starred in the film. A new mystery comedy film titled Vengeance is now out and people are wondering where they can watch it.

But B.J. Novak covers a surprisingly wide swath of territory in his directorial debut, Vengeance. Novak himself stars as Ben Manalowitz, a New York writer who's ...

Novak is a sly one, and though the script is clever and the direction certainly serviceable, it’s his face that really holds you: with those half-skeptical, half-trusting eyes, he has the visage of a person who has probably always looked a bit like a little old man, even as a baby. He connects with a hotshot producer back in New York, Issa Rae’s Eloise, and proposes a series about, you know, the death of American identity and stuff. But B.J. Novak covers a surprisingly wide swath of territory in his directorial debut, Vengeance. Novak himself stars as Ben Manalowitz, a New York writer who’s always hustling for the next story.

B.J. Novak's Vengeance wraps up commendably, but for the most part, it's a plain, half-formed political dramedy with very little to say.

Furthermore, Manalowitz’s chosen medium — the true crime and/or political podcast — is similarly an afterthought, despite the presence of a key supporting character as a parallel to him: Quinten Sellers (Ashton Kutcher), a music producer who helped Abilene record a couple of tracks. To expect Vengeance to use sound to tell its story in a meaningful way (beyond a few fleeting glimpses at Manalowitz’s podcast) is a tall order, given that even its use of images rarely seems to extend beyond “merely functional.” While a single scene of Manalowitz and the Shaws hanging out at Whataburger has an almost documentarian approach — an intrusive verité lens peeking in on unexpected joy — little else in the film’s visual construction helps tell its story, whether through individual brush strokes focused on character, or by crafting an overarching fabric. Ty, his mother (J. Smith Cameron), his grandmother (Louanne Stephens), his younger brother (Elli Abrams Bickel), and his sisters (Dove Cameron and Isabella Amara), are all afforded snappy comebacks to the snooty journalist and his presumptions, but what they aren’t afforded is a sense of perspective and experience. The key problem here is that, despite the film’s insistence that Manalowitz and his upper-crust Manhattanite ilk fail to recognize the humanity of people across America’s political spectrum, Vengeance offers them little of the same. Granted, the result of this meandering is a stunningly — and in some ways, commendably — nihilistic conclusion, rendered with an intimacy the rest of the movie lacks. He believes she was murdered and he has a culprit in mind, so he seeks out retribution and drafts Manalowitz into his service.

'The Office' star B.J. Novak's directorial debut 'Vengeance,' co-starring Ashton Kutcher, squirms away from any satirical or emotional territory that might ...

The contrivances, from the fact that Ben gets on a plane in the first place to the later twists, would be forgivable if anyone in the film felt solid and rounded out and less like a contribution to Novak’s thesis. Eloise’s team back in New York is more cynical about the endeavor; they give the project the temporary title of “Dead White Girl,” then brainstorm a list of names that includes “Douchebag Goes West” — not an inaccurate description for Ben’s fish-out-of-water antics as he navigates and talks down to the locals, including Abilene’s family, with whom he’s staying. The podcast Ben sets out to make is basically S-Town (“I will find this person, of this generalized societal force, and I will define it,” he vows), with Abilene’s death serving as the peg for an exploration of the region. Ty seems convinced that the two were in a relationship and refuses to take no for an answer, and so Ben gets on a plane and heads to West Texas, to a sun-blasted stretch of small town in between oil fields, to attend Abilene’s funeral. He gets a call in the middle of the night from a distraught man named Ty (Boyd Holbrook), who turns out to be the brother of Abilene Shaw (Lio Tipton), a half-remembered woman who rotated through Ben’s life at some point and who just died. He has a lot of thoughts about the themes of this theoretical podcast, but when he pitches them to Eloise (Issa Rae), a prominent producer, she rightfully points out that he doesn’t have a story to tell.

Newton native B.J. Novak, best known for his role as Ryan on NBC's “The Office,” has taken the creative reins in his most recent projects.

Updating an age-old fish out of water setup such as this with the internet as an obvious influence makes the world immediately that much smaller and Novak’s character explaining what a writer does and what a magazine is pushes the culture clash into cartoonish territory. As a director, Novak would likely be more successful if he hadn’t cast himself as the main focus of his own mystery. In “Vengeance,” Novak proves his chops both as an adept filmmaker and skillful satirist of contemporary mores. “Vengeance,” while earnest, thoughtful and quite funny in spots, demonstrates just how difficult it can be to turn political polarization and culture-war hostility into a credible narrative. “Vengeance” is an arrestingly smart, funny and affecting take on a slice of the American zeitgeist, one in which both the divisions between and connections with our fellow citizens are brought into sharp relief. To help you judge whether to rush to theaters starting Thursday afternoon, here’s what some of the top film critics are saying, both good and bad, about “Vengeance.”

Review By: Jonathan W. Hickman. Film Details: Director: B.J. Novak. Cast: Boyd Holbrook, Ashton Kucher, Issa Rae, and B.J. Novak.

Kutcher is a clear standout as the enigmatic record producer Sellers. He’s given long monologues that are almost too multifarious, too darned wordy to be unraveled. Regardless of my quibbles, “Vengeance” is a good start for Novak, whose voice should be better targeted in his next outing. It wants to be a dark comedy within the familiar fish-out-water plot. As Ty, Holbrook is entertaining as the loud-mouthed country boy who sets Ben on his dangerous revenge-filled journey. Of course, Ben thinks Sellers to be a man who shares his intellectual prowess and pursuits. Ben’s recordings are sent almost in real-time to Eloise back in the Big Apple. She’s thrilled by what he’s uncovering and encourages him to continue. And as an inventive, familiar plot device, he structures his film, which he also wrote, around the process of creating a podcast. The words drolly delivered with a relaxed, strangely Southern drawl impact the teen artist and surprise Ben. And since he’s a well-educated, informed member of the intellectual class, he sees Ty’s household members as simpletons. But the reality is anything but how Ben initially lenses it. However, in one off-the-record conversation with the town’s reported drug kingpin, the situation is discovered to be far more intricate than initially believed. Ty plainly explains that Texas justice involves the expert use of a gun which he has on hand.

There have been films with that name before. But although vengeance is discussed in "Vengeance"—the first feature from writer/director/star B.J. Novak, co-star ...

Novak is a thoughtful writer with a lot of things to say about the United States of America in the year 2022. Intriguingly, though, even as "Vengeance" checks box after box on the op-ed chart of American shorthand, it also presents a number of characters with idiosyncrasies and layers that we've never seen in a movie before. On one side of the great divide is a nation of "coastal elites" (driven by Harvard-educated Jewish people like Ben) who name-drop cultural tidbits that they learned in college and never revisited; sneer at monogamy, and think everything between the coasts that's not a Top Ten city is a barbaric wasteland. Like "The Daily Show" and its many imitators—and like Jon Stewart's recent film " Irresistible"—this is a movie that chastises its protagonist and the "red state" people he engages with for failing to look beyond the clichés they're fed by their own self-enclosed media loops, while at the same time dining out on them. But although vengeance is discussed in "Vengeance"—the first feature from writer/director/star B.J. Novak, co-star and co-writer of the American version of "The Office"—it has a lot more on its mind. But the notion begins to seem more plausible once he starts talking to the family and slotting them into his prefabricated East Coast media-industrial-complex notions of "red state" and "blue state" people, and spinning his theories about temporal dislocation.

"Vengeance": How cinematographer Lyn Moncrief captures the film's fish-out-of-water protagonist.

Early in the film, Ben is in New York trying to pitch his new podcast idea. For the New York office, Ben’s podcast editor Eloise (Issa Rae) had the equipment plugged in with headphones. Novak wanted to show that Ben is an aspiring podcaster with the equipment (digital podcast recorder, iPhone) to match. Though Ben might be a savvy big-city guy, the enormity of Texas is a new concept for him. Cinematographer Lyn Moncrief wanted audiences to understand the sudden shift in perspective Ben is experiencing. From the private clubs and highrises of New York to the sweltering oil fields of West Texas, B.J. Novak’s “ Vengeance,” in theaters July 29, dives into a fish-out-of-water story.

Boyd Holbrook stands in a parking lot in Vengeance. The mystery begins when Ben is called by the brother of one of his past hookups, Abilene Shaw, informing him ...

There’s a third act monologue by a character that explicitly states who Novak is condemning: us, or more specifically, the culture which encourages hot takes without context and division without empathy. Yet the beauty of Vengeance, which Novak also stars in (as Ben) and wrote, is that nothing is what it seems, and for a murder mystery that doubles as a culture clash comedy, that’s an extremely good thing. In one scene, Ben attends a rodeo and incorrectly names the wrong university as his preferred school of choice in Texas. Only a city slicker would cite UT-Austin over Texas Tech, and Ben’s embarrassment is played for well-earned laughs. The mystery begins when Ben is called by the brother of one of his past hookups, Abilene Shaw, informing him that she’s been found dead of a drug overdose in an empty field. Yet the heart of the movie is the mystery of Abilene’s death, and it’s here that Novak reveals his intentions to not only provide a good whodunit but also to critique the true crime genre itself. When we meet podcaster/reporter Ben Manalowitz, the lead character in B.J. Novak’s directorial debut Vengeance, he’s engaging in the kind of behavior that seems typical of a single New York male asshole.