Anticipation.
Bob Odenkirk: action, from the John Wick crew. Could work.
Enjoyment.
An exciting actioner with some fine performances.
In Retrospect.
Great fun but don’t expect much originality.
After more than a decade portraying pseudonymous shady lawyer Saul Goodman in Breaking Bad and its prequel series Better Call Saul, Bob Odenkirk has turned action hero. If that seems as likely as a trustworthy estate agent, hang tight. Nobody has impressive beat ’em up pedigree. Writer Derek Kolstad penned all three John Wick films released to date, while the producing team includes David Leitch, who co-directed the first Wick.
Odenkirk plays Hutch Mansell, a seemingly boring suburban family man holding down an accounts job in the office of his father-in-law’s metal fabrication company. In a funny early sequence that stylishly accelerates as it reaches its conclusion, three weeks of his dull life spins by as he pours coffee, reads spreadsheets, and misses the bin collection. This mundane existence is soon shattered when the Mansell home is invaded by two burglars who he hesitates from hurting. The burglars steal little save for his daughter’s bracelet but his son, who is punched in the face by one of them, holds him in contempt.
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His son’s disappointment and his own pride eat away at Hutch until he tracks down the burglars, a couple with a baby. Hutch still can’t face inflicting any significant violence on them but he’s now a coiled spring wanting revenge on… someone. When a gang of men harass him and other passengers on his bus home, his fury – over the burglary but perhaps also his humdrum life – floods out so spectacularly, that one of the gang, named Teddy, ends up in intensive care.
Unfortunately, Teddy’s brother Yulian is a psychopathic Russian mobster, a man who murders a man in a nightclub for looking at him a bit askew. Hutch has his own violent past in the military, where he was euphemistically described as an “auditor,” essentially a secret assassin. It’s easy to anticipate a series of violent confrontations and they certainly arrive.
Director Ilya Naishuller, making his second feature after Hardcore Henry, has a past in music videos which comes across in the sheer speed and immense energy of Nobody’s pulse-racing car chases and shoot-outs. This helps detract from the seen-it-before plotting and the occasionally clichéd line of dialogue such as “I love you but I need you to trust me.” Nobody looks the part, too, with Midsommar cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski on hand to offer smartly composed scenes of suburban ennui and city grit.
There’s delightfully spiky support from Christopher Lloyd as Hutch’s retired FBI agent dad and RZA as his half-brother. Aleksei Serebryakov is also great as malevolent force-of-nature Yulian. Some of the music choices are as overfamiliar as the storyline – no one needs to hear ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ outside a football context, for instance. Yet this gripe can’t detract from Nobody being a fine, fun blast of entertainment.
As for Odenkirk, he gamely takes on this new facet of his career with his usual dry wit and easy presence, ultimately delivering as the military man whose taste for killing returns. Good for him.
