Directed by Ilya Niashuller
Written by Derek Kolstad
Starring Bob Odenkirk, Connie Nielson, RZA, Christopher Lloyd
Rated R for strong violence and bloody images, language throughout and brief drug use
Runtime: 1 hour 32 minutes
In theaters March 26

by Ryan Silberstein, Managing Editor, The Red Herring

There’s a lot of movies about angry white guys. Do we need more?

Hutch Mansell (Odenkirk) is an angry white guy. We meet him in an Edgar Wright-esque montage of his week. Making breakfast, missing the trash truck, taking the bus to a boring job where he updates an Excel sheet for a company owned by his father-in-law. His wife (Nielson) reminds him about the trash, and they share a bed but a massive pillow separates them. His life is both boring and sad. His neighbor, whose house is hilariously elevated over Hutch’s, just bought a 1970s Dodge Charger, a car we know Hutch will be driving once the bullets start flying.

Anyway, one night, two young robbers break into Hutch’s house. He confronts them, his son (Gage Munroe) tackles one of them, but ultimately, they get away with a small amount of cash, his watch, and his daughter’s kitty cat bracelet. After discussing with his father (Christopher Lloyd) during a nursing home visit, Hutch “snaps” and tracks them down. It doesn’t go the way he expects, and ends up picking a fight with some belligerently intoxicated young men on the bus ride home. One of those youths happens to be the brother of a high powered Russian mafioso (Aleksey Serebryakov)...and you can see how the film unfolds from there. Of course, through this, it is revealed that Hutch is now retired from a job in which he had developed ‘a particular set of skills.’ 

Part of what Nobody is relying on is the unexpected nature of casting Odenkirk, known for being a comedic actor, in the role of a Keanu Reeves or Liam Neeson style ‘old man actioner.’ Odenkirk’s performance as Hutch is believable, and he uses the incongruity in his image well. But after so many other films in this subgenre, there’s only so much mileage there, and the film’s charm runs out fairly quickly. Connie Nielson is given absolutely nothing to do. Seeing her join the fun...or being the lead, would have at least changed up the formula.

Nobody is written by Derek Kolstad, creator of John Wick, and there’s nothing wrong with recycling the things that work. Nobody makes me question if Kolstad knows why Wick became such a success. The first film is drenched in grief, taking a lot of care to demonstrate why Wick is at absolute rock bottom, that he is a man with nothing left to live for except the kind of justice that looks an awful lot like revenge. Here, Hutch is presented to us as a normal suburban dad that snaps, but doubles back on that to make him a black ops agent with a ton of experience.  It’s like if Fight Club revealed that Ed Norton’s character had years of bare-knuckle boxing experience and was awesome at Fight Club. So is he a secret assassin, resentfully called back to his previous life? Or is he going through a midlife crisis that involves a lot of stabbing? Nobody doesn’t occupy itself with actually exploring Hutch’s psychology the way that the first Wick entry does.

Furthermore, Odenkirk’s character is much less sympathetic than Keanu Reeves’s in a couple key ways. He’s a family man, which means he actually has good reason to not head out into the middle of the night picking fights. Secondly, he picks the fight that puts his family in danger. Sure, those youths are bothering a woman on the bus, but rather than trying to scare them off with his revolver, he goads them into confronting him. His rage is what causes the Russian mobsters to come after Hutch and family. But the film never engages with that chain of cause and effect. What makes Hutch different from the bullies he fights? Do his ends justify his means? I think not. 

The action sequences are more or less adequate, not at the level of a Wick or Atomic Blonde, but better than Liam Neeson jumping a fence. But I don’t think Nobody should get extra points for being coherent. Because of the fuzzy-at-best psychological and emotional groundwork in the first act, by the time the grenades are flying and shotguns are being unloaded at nameless goons, the film has already worn out its welcome. There is absolutely no depth to the film, it is the equivalent of Odenkirk screaming “It’s the principle” with spit flying from his mouth as goons with automatic weapons terrorize his children. 

There is also a chance I’ve gone soft, and that the endless parade of mass shootings in America have undermined the ‘good guy with a gun’ myth so completely so as to render it impotent. Without a more exaggerated vision or a well-constructed justification, seeing a crowd of people fleeing a nightclub (even a gaudy one full of gangsters) due to gunfire just doesn’t quite register as fun anymore. We don’t need more angry white guys with guns.