KEITH UHLICH
Bob Odenkirk in Nobody
film roundup
Nobody (Dir. Ilya Naishuller). Starring: Bob Odenkirk, Aleksey Serebryakov, Connie Nielsen. Bob Odenkirk gets a John Wick to call his own with Nobody, which was written by Wick scribe Derek Kolstad and directed by Ilya Naishuller, of the manically puerile first-person action flick Hardcore Henry. A similar aura of asinine shamelessness pervades here. Odenkirk’s Hutch Mansell is a suburban family man going through the motions at a dead-end job. But what few people know is that Hutch is a retired assassin suppressing his murderous instincts for a chance at what most of us rubes would call a normal life. The habitual state of man, the film argues, is bloodthirsty and barbarous, something Hutch re-discovers when he crosses paths with a band of hooligans on a city bus. One “I’m gonna fuck you up!” and some brilliantly choreographed fisticuffs later, and Hutch has inadvertently run afoul of a Russian 14
mobster (Aleksey Serebryakov) with vengeance on the brain. From there, Nobody becomes unrepentantly flip and vile, to the point that Odenkirk’s game attempts to ground Hutch’s macho wants and needs in some recognizably human reality are nullified. [R] HH Godzilla vs. Kong (Dir. Adam Wingard). Starring: Alexander Skarsgård, Millie Bobby Brown, Rebecca Hall. A giant lizard fighting an oversize simian? Seems, entertainment-wise, like a sure thing. Yet, the fourth feature in the ongoing MonsterVerse series illustrates otherwise. The G-Guy does indeed fight the K-Guy—for about ten minutes total across the barely two-hour runtime. That wouldn’t be a problem if the rest of the film had something approaching a distinct vision, like Gareth Edwards’s astonishing sense of human-to-monster scale in 2014’s Godzilla, or a performer, like Ken Watanabe in
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2017’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters, who might lend resonant gravitas to scenes without beast-on-beast brawling. Yet everything human in Godzilla vs. Kong (Alexander Skarsgård, Millie Bobby Brown, and Rebecca Hall are among the anthropoid cast) is unfortunately perfunctory and disconnected from the tedious spectacle conjured by director Adam Wingard and his army of tech-head collaborators. There is some pleasure to be had in several of the vistas, such as a topsy-turvy Center of the Earth and a Hong Kong that’s basically a glowing-neon target for our towering protagonists’ destructive instincts. Overall, though, this is an empty-headed and hearted extravaganza. [PG-13] H The Empty Man (Dir. David Prior). Starring: James Badge Dale, Marin Ireland, Sasha Frolova. Between inclement weather, attempted studio interference, and a ravaging global pandem-
