Odenkirk turns ‘Nobody’ into something
Russian director Ilya Naishuller’s 2015 film “Hardcore Henry” made a splash with gamers because it was shot entirely like a first-person shooter. As manic as a hummingbird on Red Bull, the movie was ingenious in its execution — but ultimately enervating. What might have been mind-blowing as a 16-minute short was wearing as a 96-minute feature. Cool gimmick; shame about the movie.
Naishuller doesn’t make the same mistake in the violently entertaining “Nobody,” his first American feature. Starring Bob Odenkirk (“Better Call Saul”) as a mild-mannered guy next door driven to war against the Russian mob, “Nobody” doesn’t possess a particularly complex or original plot.
But the fact that it has any recognizable plot at all puts it bloody head and shoulders above “Hardcore Henry.” When combined with Naishuller’s Hong Kong-influenced, bodyblow brand of filmmaking and tongue-stuck-in-cheek sense of humor, “Nobody” is a fun little gut punch of a movie.
Odenkirk is Hutch Mansell, a prototypical workaday dad with two kids, one loveless marriage, a mortgage and a dull bus ride to a paper-pushing job he doesn’t really like. He’s such a pushover that when two inept home invaders break into the family’s home, he lets them go, even though he and his teenage son, Blake (Gage Munroe), have the drop on them. Blake gets so angry at his father’s unwillingness to use violence to protect his family that he looks like he wants to take a swing at him.
Apparently, Blake doesn’t know about dad’s more colorful past as a last-man-standing enforcer for all the various threeletter government agencies. Hutch gave it all up to discover what he thought would be suburban bliss and anger reduction, though, as everyone knows, just when you think you’re out, they pull you back in.
In this case, after an unfortunate melee of a bus ride in which a group of Russian thugs pick on him (but they’re the ones who end up needing to
know what their hospital copays are), Hutch finds himself in the crosshairs of Russian mobster Yulian Kuznetzov (Aleksey Serebryakov, “Mcmafia”). His son was one of the unfortunate souls on the bus. (And, martialarts fans take note, in a blinkand-you’ll-miss-him moment, one of the Russian gang is Alain Moussi, the star of such films as “Kickboxer: Vengeance” and “Kickboxer: Retaliation.”)
Hutch is helped in his battle against insurmountable odds by a “Matrix”-level of “I know kung fu,” a mastery of automatic weaponry, a brother (RZA)
who’s pretty lethal in his own right and a dad (Christopher Lloyd) who doesn’t let age get in the way of a good takedown.
“You brought a lotta shotguns,” Hutch remarks to his father before all hell breaks loose. “You brought a lotta Russians,”
dad deadpans in return.
Odenkirk, who doesn’t usually play characters who let their fists do the talking, makes for a surprisingly persuasive action hero, one who’s not invincible but is extremely determined. And, like that other middleaged, skull-cracking father in the “Taken” movies, he has “a very particular set of skills.” Of course, what makes or breaks a film like this are the action scenes, and they are plentiful and they are painful.
In other words, you may never look at “Better Call Saul” the same way again.
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