Let nobody tell you this is a true action classic
Nobody (R16, 92 mins) Directed by Ilya Naishuller Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★1⁄2
Finding out Nobody was written by Derek Kolstad, the very same bloke who penned the original John Wick and its sequels, is quite possibly the least surprising thing you will learn this year.
The sense of seen-it-before here, as Bob Odenkirk’s titular ‘‘nobody’’ offends the boss of a Russian gang and is then forced into a ludicrous series of battles to defend himself and his family from the baddies, is pretty overwhelming.
But – and it’s a big but – even though I am as big a fan of the John Wick franchise as any alleged grown-up could ever be, I still couldn’t rouse much enthusiasm for Nobody, a film that even the director admits is, err, ‘‘related’’ to the John Wick franchise. (Seriously, I love those films. Even as part three went spinning off into Matrix-style weirdness, I was still whooping and cheering in the back row, happy as a puppy on a beach at every daft moment of it.)
Maybe it was the false start that spoiled Nobody for me, as our hero gets into two unintended scraps, with only the second fight really kick-starting the film. A better, leaner script would have combined the plot points into one rootin’, tootin’ puppy-wasting conflict, and not left me wondering how the two sets of villains were connected, before belatedly realising they weren’t and that the entire first 20 minutes had mostly been the result of some lousy scripting.
Then again, at least one fight scene here is an absolute classic, as Odenkirk throws off the shackles and reveals himself to be the hardarse the trailer is promising.
Odenkirk versus a bus load of thugs will go down as one of the best cinematic scraps of the decade. So much so, that for me, Nobody peaked at around the 30-minute mark, and everything that came after was disappointingly daft, lazily implausible and tiresomely derivative.
All credit to Odenkirk for the two years of training he put in for this role, to RZA and Connie Nielsen for their thankless cameos and to Christopher Lloyd for the entirely unexpected and hilarious turn as Odenkirk’s ex-agent dad. But Nobody never shakes off the sense of being just a dad-bod John Wick and becomes its own beast.
When the film strays from the expected beats – in the relationship with the family especially – Nobody feels like it is mining Breaking Bad. At other times, you might wonder if the heroically deranged Ben Affleck vehicle The Accountant is providing the source code here, although Nobody isn’t really up to that comparison either.
A good, lean and efficient action comedy-thriller is a harder film to get right than the critics would have you believe. And there are so many of them out there, cluttering up the streams and the sale bins and only occasionally breaking through into mainstream release, that the bar is set deceptively high.
Bone-tired on a Sunday night, at a happily packed preview session, Nobody wasn’t too bad a way to pass the time. But don’t let anybody tell you this is a classic of the genre.