Sarah (Courtney Halverson) shows up. Apparently Charlie helped her mother through her cancer a little while back. He didn’t heal her, but he helped, and Sarah would like Charlie to help her father who hasn’t recovered from the death of his wife. Charlie is reticent at first, but he eventually comes around and makes the long trip further up north to help this pretty, innocent and sincere child. Then he meets this child’s brother Luke (Cory Knauf). Luke has issues. He doesn’t like Charlie for one, has his own special views on religion and also seems to like his baby sister just a little too much. It won’t take Charlie long to realize that something is terribly wrong with this family he’s visiting as a series of unfortunate events bring us right back where we started, Charlie running through the woods, all bloodied up, being chased by someone with a rifle.

‘Godspeed’, title changed from the more descriptive ‘Bloody Revenge’, is a movie that is so beautiful to look at it almost had you wanting you to catch a bi-plane and go moose hunting with Sarah Palin. ‘Godspeed’ is also a movie that is very well acted and has a story driving it that that for the most part is unique, and that is something is that rare and something that I don’t get to say that often.

So why didn’t I enjoy ‘Godspeed’ more? Part of it is possibly because of the dialog that comes out of some of these characters mouths in this movie. Not how the actors said this dialog but more accurately what was being said. For instance there was one particular scene when the character of Sarah was telling the character of Charlie how she felt about him. Her soliloquy, which is what it was, was poetic and felt almost Shakespearean. It also felt completely unnatural, out of place and staged. Courtney Halverson delivered this speech with passion and conviction but actually who speaks like this? Particularly in a movie centered around bloody revenge, a movie filled with murder, death, rape, and folks getting their heads bashed in with rocks. The inquisitive prostitute is another example of something that I don’t think a particular character, a whore in this case, would actually say. When the characters are actually talking to each other, say like when Charlie is arguing with his wife, the dialog works but when the characters are off giving speeches while looking off in the distance, it just didn’t work at all for me. Veteran actor Ed Lauter gave one these speeches and his seemed to work better coming from him, possibly because it was Ed Lauter delivering it, playing a character he’s played a thousand times before, but his worked.

A byproduct of the sermonizing in this film gives us a movie that moves very slowly. Now if you aren’t bothered by these lengthy speeches as I was, or better yet found them engrossing and relevant, then the slow pace probably won’t affect you as much because this dialog will mean more to you. Some of the slowness can also be attributed to the loving shots of the Alaskan fauna which was effective in creating a sense of loneliness and isolation that almost all of these characters were stricken with.

There are some good things in this movie ‘Godspeed’ with the fine performances, a solid narrative, some shocking violence and director Robert Saitzyk’s confident command of his camera and what he wants his audience to see. But some of the dialog and the way it was constructed kept me from completely embracing this movie as much as I would’ve like to.