‘Guns & Moses’ Has It All: A Must-See Faith-Based Mystery Masterpiece
(REVIEW) Faith-based action movies are rare. Good ones are even rarer. While the faith-based film industry has been a thriving genre for more than 20 years, it’s mostly kept to inspirational dramas. There are a lot of reasons for this. One is that the primary audience for these films is Christian moms, who don’t watch as many action films. Another is that most religious observers see their faith as primarily promoting love and reconciliation, which is sometimes hard to reconcile with movies about committing violence.
That’s one reason why “Guns & Moses” is such an impressive feat. The film expertly tells a story that is emotionally satisfying from both an action and faith standpoint. This makes for a uniquely enjoyable movie experience — and maybe even a uniquely sanctifying religious one.
In “Guns & Moses,” Moses Zaltzman is a beloved Chabad rabbi in a dusty desert town in the fictional California town of High Desert. When his congregation is violently attacked, police quickly arrest a young white nationalist who threatened them in the past. Rabbi Mo thinks the troubled teen may be innocent. With no one else willing to investigate, Rabbi Mo becomes the detective, and as the bodies pile up, he must learn how to use a gun in order to battle the real enemy.
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The film is partly inspired by the 2019 shooting at a Chabad-run synagogue in the San Diego suburb of Poway that left one dead and three injured. Director Salvador Litvak interviewed the synagogue’s rabbi who moved him with his faith.
“I got to know him and then watched him become a national figure in the ensuing days, calling for mitzvahs,” recalled the writer-director. “Calling for Jews and all people to do good deeds, to make something good and meaningful come in the wake of this tragedy. I was very moved by that, and that really became the core for ‘Guns & Moses.’”
Litvak said he wanted to make a movie that spoke to this reality, but in the style of an old-school thriller like Howard Hawks’s “Rio Bravo” and Alfred Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest.” Actor Mark Feuerstein, who plays Moses, compared its combination of faith and action to “‘Chinatown’ meets ‘The Chosen.’”
“Guns & Moses” is that. But the film is also deeply entertaining. The writing is sharp, introducing us to the characters, setting and themes, while developing them with few, if any, hiccups. The dialogue is funny, dramatic, exciting, heartbreaking and moving as it needs to be. The action builds slowly and plausibly so that when it finally goes all out, it has weight and truly gets your blood pumping. Moses Zaltzman is lovable as a charmingly Woody Allen-esque, self-effacing but good-hearted rabbi. And his growth into someone capable of violence in the right circumstances is earned.
The acting is top-notch as well, with performers like Mark Feuerstein and Neil McDonough having to show multiple sides to themselves as layers of them are uncovered, yet they never feel false. Christopher Lloyd turns in a fantastic performance as a Holocaust survivor who gets to tell his story in an affecting scene.
What makes the film effective in being refreshingly different is how it combines many different film genre tropes into one film to tell its story. We are familiar with seeing charming and affectionate, self-effacing portraits of Jewish culture. We are familiar with the tropes of the mystery film and an amateur gumshoe proving the innocence of the wrongly convicted. We are familiar with the trope of the unlikely hero saving the day. We are familiar with stories of people struggling with their faith.
We are also familiar with slow burn thrillers that eventually boil over into massive shootouts. But we are not familiar with seeing them all together. This new combination makes the film interesting. But because we are so well acquainted with these individual formulas, we feel secure navigating the unusual — and even uncomfortable — terrain.
There’s plenty of terrain here that’s both unusual and uncomfortable. “Guns & Moses” follows a rabbi trying to shepherd a community under the constant threat of antisemitism, shaken by what appears to be a clear-cut hate crime committed by a young, online-radicalized white nationalist. Moses’s attempts to reach out to the man, challenge his views, and eventually defend him from hate crime charges involve navigating the complex landscape of what fuels antisemitism—and how fear of it can sometimes misfire.
Its portrayal of faith is particularly nuanced and well-rounded. As I’ve written before, Christians and Jews tend to make very different kinds of films when they emphasize religious identity. Christians — especially those in the faith-based film industry — typically de-emphasize cultural distinctiveness while highlighting religious beliefs and the individual’s relationship with God. Jewish films, by contrast, often play up cultural distinctives while downplaying religious belief or a personal relationship with God. Similarly, Christian films often lean into melodrama, whereas Jewish films more commonly lean into comedy, reflecting broader cultural tendencies.
This year’s big Christian melodrama, “The Unbreakable Boy,” centers on an everyman protagonist (played by Zachary Levi) in an “average American family” who grows in his personal faith. Meanwhile, “Bad Shabbos” is a comedy about a Jewish man and his gentile fiancée navigating the struggles of cultural integration.
These differences reflect the categories sociologists like Ryan Burge use to analyze religion: belief, belonging, and practice. Christian films tend to emphasize belief, while Jewish films lean into belonging and practice. This likely stems from both ancient and recent histories of the two faiths.
Christianity has always been a confessional faith — defined by shared beliefs. Protestantism heightened the emphasis on belief over practice (“faith over works”), and Evangelicalism further intensified the focus on personal belief and relationship with God in response to cultural and institutional decline in the 20th century. Since Evangelicalism has been the most resilient form of American Christianity since the 1970s, and has largely shaped the faith-based film industry, it makes sense that this emphasis on belief would dominate its films.
In contrast, as author Roy Schwartz told me in a recent interview, Jews were a “people” before they were a nation or — arguably — even a religion. After the Holocaust, many found the “belief” aspect of identity difficult to reconcile, leaving “belonging” and “practice” as the more durable expressions of Jewish faith.
Guns & Moses explores the interplay between belief, belonging, and practice within a distinctly Jewish context. Moses is a rabbi who genuinely tries to care for his community, even though many of its members are open about not believing in God.
At one point, Christopher Lloyd’s character, Sol, says to Moses, “God? I stopped believing in him 80 years ago.”
“And yet you never miss services,” Moses replies.
Sol laughs: “I just come for the brownies.”
But Moses’s faith is real. He prays and sings to God — even before the final battle. In one of the film’s most moving scenes, he admits to the young man that he struggles not with belief in God, but with belief in himself. “God, I believe in. Me, not so much.” His personal arc is about reconciling that gap. In emphasizing a personal journey with God, Moses resembles the best of Christian faith-based protagonists. Yet by shifting the doubt inward rather than upward, he becomes more self-effacing than self-serious, in contrast with many Christian counterparts.
This nuance is especially compelling in the film’s treatment of faith and violence. In a post-9/11 world, religious justifications for violence make many people uneasy — and with good reason. Still, most religious communities support violence under certain circumstances. In Jewish contexts, this conversation is especially relevant. In 2023, Tablet magazine’s Editor-at-Large, Liel Leibovitz, argued that rising antisemitism made it a Jewish responsibility to own guns for protection.
Yet most faith-based films don’t thoughtfully explore how to reconcile religion’s teachings on love with real-world support for violence. This avoidance only worsens the issue. When we lack cultural frameworks that integrate faith and violence, violence becomes something outside the moral and theological order — something unbound by religious ethics.
We see this in how Christian faith-based films dabble in the action genre. Films like “Machine Gun Preacher,” “Beckman” and “Birthright Outlaw” often present violent protagonists who convert to Christianity, abandon violence, then revert to their old ways to save someone. The spiritual and action climaxes compete with each other, undermining the effectiveness of both.
By contrast, “Guns & Moses” seamlessly integrates faith, action, and character. Moses begins with an understanding of the need for protection, but is uncomfortable participating in violence himself. When his bodyguard, Brenda, offers to teach him how to shoot, he protests: “I told you, Brenda — this is a tool of your trade, not mine.”
She replies, “Rabbi, if you want to save your flock from sin, you need a Bible. If you want to save it from killers, you need a gun.”
This echoes the approach of Christian nonviolence advocates like Martin Luther King Jr., who believed in loving enemies into friendship — a “double victory” — but also in enforcing civil rights with protective laws. As King put it, “It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me; religion and education will have to do that. But it can restrain him from lynching me. And I think that’s pretty important also.” Whether one agrees or disagrees with this reasoning, it’s at least a serious engagement with the relationship between faith and just violence—an engagement “Guns & Moses” shares.
Moses eventually grows more comfortable using a gun to protect his community while never abandoning his commitment to love—even the former white nationalist. When the final confrontation arrives, both the young man and his father stand with Moses. The action and the redemption unfold together, offering a cathartic resolution rooted in faith.
The film isn’t perfect. Some character development is told rather than shown. Moses claims to lack confidence and fears he'll hurt someone by mistake, but we rarely see this fear manifest. He mostly comes across as bold and determined. Some plot twists — like the identity of the true villain — are telegraphed early on. Still, none of this detracts significantly from the film’s entertainment value or the joy of seeing faith meaningfully integrated into unexpected settings.
“Guns & Moses” is a rare film that succeeds both as compelling entertainment and as a surprisingly thoughtful exploration of faith. It’s a model that shows how believers can examine all aspects of life through their faith and art — including those they'd prefer to keep in a concealed carry.
“Guns & Moses” is playing now in select through Sept. 11. It will be available to stream online starting Oct. 14.
Joseph Holmes is an award-nominated filmmaker and culture critic living in New York. He is co-host of the podcast “The Overthinkers” and its companion website theoverthinkersjournal.world, where he discusses art, culture and faith with his fellow overthinkers. His other work and contact info can be found at josephholmesstudios.com.