Tara Lynne Barr and Joel Murray (Magnet Releasing)

You might recall Bobcat Goldthwait from the 1980s and ’90s as that guy who would always let out weird scream-spasms on screen (the Police Academy movies) and in his stand-up routine, as if he might have had a stutter but then overcame it with Tourette’s. Since then he’s become a provocative pitch-black comedy director (Shakes the Clown about a drunk clown, Sleeping Dogs Lie about a woman’s “encounter” with a dog, and World’s Greatest Dad starring Robin Williams as a father who… well, you’ll just have to see that one for yourself). His latest film, God Bless America, is one loud scream at the American media.

Frank (Joel Murray) works a non-descript office job and suffers from migraines. He’s divorced with a young bratty daughter (the type who complains about getting a Blackberry instead of an iPhone) and has two very major problems on top of his already agitated state—he’s fired for a questionable but innocent act of kindness towards a secretary (he sent flowers to her house when she was sick just to be nice) and he finds out he has an inoperable tumor in his brain.

Already we know how he feels about the media since we see him watching the kind of crap that all too many Americans watch (though I guess Frank doesn’t read, something Goldthwait oddly never touches on, but I digress), but the last double-whammy makes him say to himself “the hell with it” and he decides to kill a super-bratty My Super Sweet 16-type of reality TV star. Another teenage girl, Roxy (Tara Lynne Barr), witnesses the shooting, and is overjoyed at Frank’s calculated crime, and begs and pleads to tag along as Frank’s cohort in crime. He relents. They roam across the country taking out all the mean and nasty people they’ve seen for far too long on TV.

The first thing that one might compare this to is something like Natural Born Killers, where the satirical aim is also directed toward the media and loaded with bullets that explode everything in sight. For me, it was more like the TV show Breaking Bad, where an older, traditional Average Joe is put into dire straits and does some very bad things, but for a good(?) cause. What is admirable in God Bless America is that Goldthwait doesn’t make it very easy at all times to be on Frank’s side, especially near the end when he targets his biggest axe to grind with the American Idol clone “American Supertarz.”

And yet at the same time Goldthwait seems to by saying, “Okay, yeah they’re anti-heroes, but would you ever consider doing this yourself?” In a brilliantly darkly comic scene, Frank and Roxy stop off to see a movie (a documentary about the My Lai Massacre of all things), and a bunch of snotty young people are talking behind them on their cell phones. This escalates into Frank and Roxy shooting the teens. Frank then gratefully says his thanks to the one girl who is still alive for not talking or being disruptive during the movie.

Sometimes Goldthwait can have his characters go on too lengthy tangents about who they’d like to kill. It’s not that it isn’t amusing, but it takes away from the relationship between Frank and Roxy—completely non-sexual and perhaps more like a father-daughter bond that supplants the one that’s lacking between Frank and his actual daughter. It starts off a little cloying (didn’t we just see this bond last year in Super between Rainn Wilson and Ellen Page?) but becomes rather sweet and the emotional backbone for all of the wildness that ensues with the violence.

Some may be put off by Goldthwait claims about the media, but really the movie doesn’t say anything too far off in its depictions of the nastiness, cynicism, and rampant stupidity that plagues the media that a season of South Park wouldn’t satirize. While it gets a tiny bit preachy near the very end, God Bless America is a media revenge fantasy, yet it doesn’t lack for smart characters and a winning, endearing performance from Joel Murray, who, I believe, has his first leading role here (he’s been in TV, ironically perhaps, for most of his career).