As a lifelong fan of action movies. I really wanted to like Guns & Moses. As soon as I heard about Salvador Litvak's new action film—about a rabbi (Mark Feuerstein) who takes up a gun in response to the murder of one of his congregants at a synagogue event—I thought it sounded right up my alley.
Besides the terrific title, there were many reasons to look forward to the movie. Litvak has a great backstory as the Accidental Talmudist, who discovered Jewish study as an adult and became Orthodox as a result. He immersed himself in the American action-film genre in preparation for the movie. And he had a worthy mission. He wanted to show that existing depictions of Jews on-screen are "not the limit of Jewish experience, God knows."
The film has a great cast, including well-known actors such as Christopher Lloyd, Neal McDonough, and Dermot Mulroney. Last, but certainly not least, it was timely: Guns & Moses was inspired by our current crisis of antisemitic violence, the spate of deadly incidents and the continuing dangers from antisemites from the left, right, and Islamism. Yet despite these many advantages, the film is undone by succumbing to the mind-numbing and deadly boring Hollywood trope of making the killers come not from the capacious storehouse of (authentically scary!) real-world antisemites, but from the world of stock Hollywood movie villains—nefarious (but not antisemitically motivated) businessmen and former members of the U.S. military.
It is difficult to understand why the ordinarily thoughtful Litvak made the decisions he did. He is clearly aware of the real threat of violent antisemitism and has claimed that he was inspired to make Guns & Moses by the 2019 Poway, California, shooting at a Chabad synagogue. The Poway shooter was a particularly vicious young antisemite who declared, "I can only kill so many Jews." Clearly, the Poway shooter would have been a credible inspiration for a villain in a film about responding to a synagogue attack. But Litvak did not make a Poway-style antisemite the killer in his film, although he does present a young neo-Nazi suspect as a red herring.
Perhaps Litvak thought it was too obvious to have a neo-Nazi as the killer. Sadly, there is an array of violent and dangerous antisemitic types in addition to neo-Nazis from which Litvak could have selected a villain. According to the terrorism expert Daniel Pipes, there have been 23 violent Muslim-on-Jewish attacks in the United States since 1977.
Perhaps Litvak thought highlighting Islamist antisemitism was another cliché and could lead to even more division between Jews and Muslims. If so, he could have made his killer a left-wing anti-Israel activist, such as the monster who shot two Israeli embassy staffers outside a Jewish event in Washington this past summer. In today's Hollywood, having an actual antisemite from one of these groups as the killer would certainly have been the more unexpected twist.
Genre-wise, the decision not to have an antisemite as the villain is a conceptual failure. For the action genre to work, a connection to real-world villains is important. We saw this in the action movies of the 1980s and 1990s that dominated the box office. Actors like Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Bruce Willis took on loathsome villains like Soviet troops (Rambo), Islamist terrorists (True Lies), or European Marxist cells turned robbers (Die Hard) with wit, aplomb, and heavy weaponry. These movies worked because they provided us with cartoon versions of real-world villains who were then satisfyingly dispatched by cartoon versions of real-world heroes. That's how action movies work.
Unfortunately, while villains representing actual American enemies are still part of the standard action movie plot, they are now routinely presented as innocents and red herrings. Catharsis is thereby frustrated and replaced with an accusation of complicity when the businessmen or U.S. security officials who are "really" behind the plot are handcuffed and led off to prison. As the film historian Craig Ian Mann wrote in 2024, "Where the action cinema of the Reagan era made villains of the nation's foreign and domestic enemies, the next decade saw the genre question whether the United States—and its deeply entrenched ideologies—might be the real bad guy after all."
The problem with Hollywood's blame-the-USA approach is that Americans do not really want to see movies that tell them that they are the bad guy and that frustrate the age-old dramatic drive toward catharsis—which Aristotle defined as "the process of releasing, and thereby providing relief from, strong or repressed emotions." Aristotle first mentions catharsis in his Politics in regards to music. In Poetics, though, Aristotle refers to catharsis in tragedies, writing that "tragedy is, then, a representation of an action that is heroic and complete and of a certain magnitude." This is indeed the type of catharsis we see in the classic action movies, in which heroic acts attain a larger-than-life magnitude by confronting a serious threat to the citizenry.
In action movies, catharsis manifests as the satisfying release upon seeing justice done. As Harvey O'Brien writes in his 2012 book, Action Movies: The Cinema of Striking Back, action movies are "clearly a classical narrative cinema in this sense, offering catharsis through resolution of the disruption to the status quo." In American movies, catharsis was often provided by the meting out of "simple justice" in what audiences understood to be an increasing complex and bureaucratized world. In the 1970s, for example, American audiences enjoyed Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry, in which Eastwood's hard-bitten cop disrupts the status quo of lawyers and bureaucrats who get in the way of his efforts to take down a serial killer.
Catharsis in action movies comes from three sources: the immediacy of on-screen retribution, without interference from a court system that too often lets criminals free; the clarity of good defeating evil, often despite seemingly overwhelming odds; and third, from knowing what should happen and eventually seeing it play out on-screen. The cathartic action film lays out a clear morality, having little trouble distinguishing between right and wrong.
Catharsis is missing from the modern action movie due to Hollywood's relentless focus on evil corporations, the CIA, the police, the military, or some combination of the above. There is no release in being told that the institutions representing the American system are all corrupt. For the audience, it is enervating rather than energizing to be told that the problem is not from external enemies but from unseen internal conspirators—specifically the ones that are tasked with keeping Americans safe.
Hollywood's habit of making America the go-to villain in contemporary movies creates downstream effects. Young consumers of these films are then trained to hate the West, America, and—importantly for Jews—Israel as well. We see the evidence of this blinkered thinking in the violent anti-Israel and anti-America protests that have plagued elite college campuses since Oct. 7, 2023. These students never protest the evils carried out by Vladimir Putin, the Chinese Communist Party, North Korea, or Iran and its terrorist proxies, in part because the popular culture never told them that these entities were evil.
Consistently portraying businessmen as villains in league with law enforcement or national security agents is part of a larger cultural attempt on the left to undermine American institutions and make people uncomfortable with and skeptical of our systems of government and commerce. And yet it is these same systems that have, it is important to note, also protected and provided opportunities for Jews throughout American history. Indeed, one key difference between antisemitism in the United States and other places in history is that the U.S. government and institutions have largely been opposed to antisemitism and committed to stopping it, while the sorry history of antisemitism in too many other countries has been one in which governments either ignore or, worse, incite antisemitism from the top. In ignoring the real-world threat that antisemitism poses to Jews and instead blaming capitalists and the American security establishment, Litvak does both his subject and his movie a disservice—while denigrating institutions to which American Jews should be grateful, not hateful.
In a certain sense, it is unsurprising that Litvak went the tried-and-true conspiracy route instead of the antisemitism one. He says in the introduction to the film that he and his wife watched hundreds of thrillers while conceiving this movie: "We really did a deep dive on the genre. We watched a thriller a day for two years, six days a week (we didn't watch one on Shabbos)." If recent thrillers are your guiding light, then you will, of course, make a movie in which the obvious real-world villains—violent antisemites, of the left, right, or Islamist variety—are not the problem, but businessmen and former U.S. military members are.
Litvak claims that he is trying to challenge conventional wisdom and get away from the clichéd tropes of the standard action movie. If he really wanted to do that, though, he should have made his villains the actual antisemites who are trying to harm Jews instead of the U.S. security officials who are trying to protect them. If he had done that, Guns & Moses not only would have been more satisfying but also would have provided a helpful message about the very real dangers of antisemitism in 21st-century America. The problem with Guns & Moses is that there's no need to invent a villain that doesn't exist. The real villains are out there, and Litvak's film unfortunately lets them off the hook.