Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Ilya Naishuller
Starring: Bob Odenkirk, Connie Nielsen, RZA, Aleksey Serebryakov, Christopher
Lloyd
With Nobody, director Ilya Naishuller and writer Derek Kolstad do for
vigilante action flicks what Coralie Fargeat did for rape-revenge
thrillers with
Revenge. As with that French film, Nobody takes a disreputable genre
and rehabilitates it by embracing its appeal to the recesses of our lizard
brains while commenting on and having playful fun with its tropes.
We're supposed to be above the notion of a mild-mannered hero
taking on "the scum", but are we really? Who among us hasn't fantasised
about beating seven bells out of the obnoxious group of drunken frat boys
who make everyone's late night bus ride an endurance test? Umm, just me?
Really? I don't believe you.
Nobody succeeds largely for the same reason Eli Roth's
Death Wish
remake failed. Roth made the amateur mistake of casting Bruce Willis in the
role of the everyman turned ass-kicker, which is a bit like casting Jack
Nicholson as Jack Torrance. That film couldn't shake off Willis's action
hero baggage, making it impossible to view him as an ordinary bloke pushed
to the edge.
Here, Naishuller casts Bob Odenkirk in the role of his humble family
man turned one-man army protagonist. Odenkirk is the sort of actor you
wouldn't look twice at if you passed him in the street, and you certainly
wouldn't think of him as an action hero. This is what makes
Nobody so much fun, watching this average Joe transform into a
ruthless killing machine.
In a rapidly edited montage, Nobody outlines the drudgery of
the existence of Odenkirk's wonderfully named Hutch Mansell. He wakes in the
morning, forgets to put the bins out, takes the bus to work, sits in a
dreary office all day before returning home to a dinner with his
disinterested family, eventually flopping into bed beside his wife (Connie Nielsen, who looks much more of a traditional action star than Odenkirk), who is
either already asleep or pretending that's the case. Rinse, wash,
repeat.
Hutch's life is shaken up when he disturbs a pair of balaclava-ed burglars
late one night. Despite his teenage son tackling one of the intruders to the
ground, Hutch insists that the thieves simply leave, making him a wuss in
his son's eyes. After being mocked for his inaction by everyone from the
investigating cops to his macho co-workers, something snaps in Hutch that
makes him set out to face the burglars. Little does he know that this will
inadvertently lead him into a war with the local branch of the Russian
Mafia.
Nobody is a movie of two halves. The first half, which charts
Hutch's transformation into a psycho whose every body part should be
registered as a lethal weapon, is an absolute blast. Naishuller (whose
previous film,
Hardcore Henry, I found insufferable) draws inspiration from Sam Raimi's
Evil Dead movies, with Odenkirk taking a beating even Bruce
Campbell might wince at. Like Raimi, Naishuller takes the sort of violence
you might find in a Three Stooges short and twists it into bone-crunching,
hard-hitting action. The film's much vaunted centrepiece is a mass brawl in
the confines of a bus, and Naishuller and his fight coordinators find
multiple imaginative ways to create chaos in such a confined setting. By the
midway point, you'll never look at Odenkirk in the same way again.
It's at that point however, that Nobody becomes less
interesting. Odenkirk's Hutch has essentially morphed from a comic book Paul
Kersey into Liam Neeson's Taken protagonist, and the film
struggles to replicate the fun of watching a suburban schlub turn into a
wrecking ball on legs. When a generic bunch of Russian stereotypes enter the
picture, the movie begins to resemble the sort of straight to video schlock
it's playfully referencing. Things are eventually enlivened once more in a
cleverly staged action climax, where every tool in Hutch's workplace is
turned into a weapon. Oh, and you get to see an 80-year-old
Christopher Lloyd kicking ass as Hutch's ex-FBI agent father to the
strains of 'You'll Never Walk Alone'.
Nobody is on Netflix UK/ROI
now.