The age of quality television was essentially launched on the backs of three shows (“The Sopranos,” “Mad Men,” and “Breaking Bad”), all of them built around totemic male figures who were perilously divided between their conventional middle-class family lives and their violent/erotomaniac sociopathic hidden selves. Bob Odenkirk, pinging off his role as the con artist/consigliere of “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul,” plays out an extreme version of that same syndrome in the knowingly preposterous 2021 action thriller “Nobody” and its even more maximally heightened, ridiculous, and diverting sequel, “Nobody 2.”
Odenkirk’s Hutch Mansell is a mild suburban family man who Odenkirk endows with the scruffy soul of an anxious downcast mutt, as if he were Steve Carell crossed with Kevin Costner’s sad-sack super-geek brother. But that, deep down, is not who Hutch is. He’s actually a ruthless spy/assassin with fighting abilities so violently elevated he’s invincible. He doesn’t just beat adversaries to a pulp — he pretty much murders them.
That someone this nerdish could be this much of a secret badass is the joke of the “Nobody” films, and it’s also what makes them down-and-dirty comic-book fun. Odenkirk comes on like one of those Jekyll-and-Hyde quality-TV heroes crossed with every Sly/Arnold/Bruce Willis/John Wick avenger you’ve ever seen. If that sounds hopelessly gimmicky, maybe it is, but it’s a testament to Odenkirk’s skill as an actor that he makes us buy this cartoon duality.
“Nobody 2” is more centered than “Nobody” was on Hutch’s home life. Because of the massive pile of Russian money he incinerated at the end of the first film, he owes $30 million to the shadow organization he’s working for. This means that he has to keep taking freelance gigs — like the one early on that involves him destroying five men in an elevator, all so that he can retrieve a precious hard drive, only to emerge facing a team of Corsicans with MP7s followed by Brazilians with machetes. (He defeats them all.)
The problem is that taking these assignments to pay off his debt has made him an absentee husband and dad. His two teenagers, Brady (Gage Munroe) and Sammy (Paisley Cadorath), all but ignore him, and his wife, Becca (played by Connie Nielsen, warmer than you ever would have expected Connie Nielsen to be), has just about had it with him. So Hutch decides to organize a vacation. He will take his family to PlummerVille, “The oldest water park in America,” a place that Hutch has overly fond memories of because it’s the site of the one vacation his father (Christopher Lloyd) ever took him and his brother on. He wants to live out his youth again (the same way Don Draper did when he hauled Megan to a Howard Johnson’s in upstate New York). So he convinces his family to accompany him to this ancient amusement park with its dowdy motel (the “honeymoon suite” looks like something homeless people would take refuge in), its boardwalk arcade, and its general listless air of 40-years-out-of-date diversion.
For a while, the movie is like “National Lampoon’s Vacation” if Clark Griswold had secretly been Steven Seagal. Is it remotely “believable”? No. But “Nobody 2,” spanked along by the 1969 kitsch jauntiness of Spiral Staircase’s “More Today Than Yesterday,” unfolds in its own weirdly grounded action-fantasy universe. Odenkirk has the ability to make behaving glumly fretful seem like a form of slyness; he’s really creating a conspiracy with the audience. That Hutch is a limb-chopping, face-smashing killer who is also an emasculated sitcom dad is just a (barely) more exaggerated version of what all these demagogic action icons have always been: insanely unreal superhero brutalists. At least “Nobody 2,” directed with high-powered chintzy glee by Timo Tjahjanto, is honest enough to let us know that the movie is giggling right along with us.
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Hutch is no passive-aggressive provocateur. In his ugly Hawaiian vacation shirt, he’s trying to keep his head down and stay out of trouble. But the fact that trouble finds him is part of his karma. The local sheriff, played with sinister unblinking charisma by Colin Hanks, gives him a hard time as he’s waiting for his family’s hot-dog order. And when Hutch’s son gets into a fight at the arcade, drawing in a local adult who has the temerity to give Hutch’s daughter a shove, Hutch can’t help himself; he’s got to show these bullies who’s boss.
This is the first thing he’s done in ages that impresses his son, but PlummerVille, wouldn’t you know it, turns out to be the shipment hub of a criminal empire. It’s run by Lendina, played by Sharon Stone in slicked-back hair, blue sunglasses, and an ’80s power suit. She’s like a vampire with the head of a cobra, delivering every word — and her every other word is fuck — with a viciousness so magnetic that she seems to be spitting her lines. If Stone is rage incarnate, RZA, as Hutch’s samurai-sword-wielding brother, is pure Zen suavity.
Lendina’s thugs try to force Hutch out of town, attacking him on a duck boat. But there’s only one way that he responds to a threat like that: by killing back. Hard. Odenkirk, as he did in “Nobody,” trained extensively for the fight scenes, and you feel that not because he’s executing “balletic” moves but because there’s a casual flow to the homicide; he really looks like he means it. Odenkirk, who started out as a comedian, has willed himself into playing a man who speaks through acts of demolition. And “Nobody 2” turns into one of those “The couple that slays together stays together” movies, all but setting up the next entry in the franchise. That feels like a natural, even if the nobody is now a somebody.
From Variety US