REVIEW
Suburban Commando Bob Odenkirk becomes the world’s unlikeliest action hero in the quirky, brutal Nobody BY NATHAN WEINBENDER
I
was just thinking the other day about how overblown and overwritten so many blockbuster movies are these days, filled with too many stock characters and needless exposition. Then along comes the new thriller Nobody, which clocks in at about 80 minutes and is so unconcerned with backstory and context that its propulsive narrative drive is almost pathological. In fact, the movie’s murderous antihero, played by Bob Odenkirk, keeps trying to explain his origins to his enemies, but they keep dying on him before he can finish. Yes, that Bob Odenkirk, who has developed the persona of a swindling sleazeball on Breaking Bad and its spinoff Better Call Saul but is here playing against type as an unstoppable killing machine. And yet he’s somehow weirdly convincing in that mode, a so-called former “auditor” whose old job involved taking out the bad guys that other assassins wouldn’t touch. Now he has settled into a life of suburban ennui, presumably as a cover. At the start of the film, Odenkirk’s character, an exceedingly ordinary guy named Hutch, is introduced to us in a breathless montage of daily drudgery and minor humiliations. (This is a similar narrative tactic to the forgotten Liam Neeson thriller The Commuter, another film about a seemingly everyday schmo swinging into action.) He has the same breakfast. He misses the garbage truck without fail. He stares all day at Excel spreadsheets in the offices of a metal fabrication plant.
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That tedium is broken when a couple of masked mystery to us, but his targets’ terrified reactions to his thugs break into his home in the middle of the night. Alpresence told us all we needed to know. The series has though his teenage son tackles one of the invaders, Hutch become more narratively elaborate over time, establisheventually allows them to run off, and his acquiescence ing a byzantine ecosystem of assassins and ballerinas and makes him the butt of jokes at his traditionally macho entire capitalist structures catering to globe-trotting murworkplace. derers. The very terseness of Nobody feels like a rebuke But when he realizes the bad guys might to those developments: It has no time to have stolen his younger daughter’s kitty cat stop and explain anything to us. NOBODY bracelet, Hutch’s long-buried instincts kick in. The movie isn’t quite as novel as Rated R We see what he’s capable of in a terrific burst some of its fiercest loyalists have made it Directed by Ilya Naishuller of action on a city bus, where five drunk dudes Starring Bob Odenkirk, Connie sound. Its reliance on ironic needle drops, hop aboard and start menacing the passengers, mostly songs from ’50s and ’60s crooners, Nielsen, Christopher Lloyd so Hutch takes them out single handedly (not feels dated. The finale, set inside a boobyIn theaters and on VOD without quite a few scrapes and bruises himtrapped warehouse, is too reminiscent of self). One of those guys, now laid up in the hosthe hardware store-set conclusion of the pital, turns out to be the brother of a powerful Russian Denzel Washington actioner The Equalizer, and feels a gangster, who immediately puts Hutch in his crosshairs. bit rushed, despite some particularly insane visual gags What we have here is a relatively clever switchinvolving flying steel rebar and pieces of plexiglass used eroo: We think we’re getting a riff on the old Death Wish as body shields. formula, wherein a meek suburban man becomes a But I think what its fans are responding to is its pure vigilante when confronted with violence, but what Nobody single mindedness (its director, Ilya Naishuller, also made delivers instead is a variation on the John Wick blueprint. the similarly nutso shoot-’em-up Hardcore Henry) and like Oddly enough, the screenwriter of Nobody also created the the first John Wick, it already seems to have developed character of John Wick, and this almost feels like an even a cult following. It might be fun to see it in one of those leaner draft of that original script. theaters where they bring you drinks during the movie, The gag of the first John Wick was, of course, that although it’ll probably be over before you’re able to order the titular assassin’s reputation preceded him; he was a a second round. n
