Manly men go on a bloodlust tear in awful ‘Nobody’
“Nobody”
Rated: R for language and extreme violence. Running time: 91 minutes.
1⁄2 (out of four)
Lurking in the heart of all family men is this: A restlessness that gnaws at the thin veneer of civility they’ve hidden themselves in. That seems to be one of the lessons of the dopey film “Nobody.” It says that what all regular Joes really want to is to blow away multiple bad guys with a Walther PPK as music swells.
Bob Odenkirk makes a disastrous turn as an assassinturned-nice-guy-turnedassassin-again in a role that’s all macho wish-fulfillment fantasy. The movie suggests that the meek will not only inherit the Earth, they will strafe, slice, bomb and hack their way to it, all for the adoration of their wives and once-sullen kids.
The body count is in the hundreds and so far past numbing that it’s comical by the end of this pale cousin of the “John Wick” films, which isn’t a coincidence since they share the same producers and writer, Derek Kolstad.
The film begins as a flashback, with Odenkirk as a mild-mannered suburban dad stuck in a repetitive rut: going to work at a tool and die, taking out the garbage and commuting. He’s ignored by his teenage son and his wife puts a pillow between them in the bed at night like a buffer. He used to be a federal killer but has given up that life. Now his mojo’s gone. “Remember who we used to be? I do,” he tells his wife. Then a home invasion stirs the pot. He looks like a chump for his inaction — “I was just trying to keep damage to a minimum,” he explains to the cops. But that sets
him down a brutal path that results in hundreds of stunt men with bad Russian accents being mowed down. It turns out his mojo is murder.
“Who are you?” someone asks. “Nobody,” he responds in his best flinty Clint Eastwood. And yet, the impression is that the filmmakers want it to be everybody.
After avenging his family’s
honor, Odenkirk’s sad sack husband encounters seven drunken thugs threatening a woman on his bus. He attacks them brutally and bloodily — twice. Before leaving, he gives one of the guys a tracheotomy with a fast-food drink straw. That guy turns out to be the younger brother of a powerful Russian mobster and sociopath.