Lurking in the hearts of all family members is this: a restlessness that erodes the fine varnish of civility in which they hide. This seems to be one of the lessons of the stupid film “Nobody”. He says that what all regular Joes really want is to end several bad guys with a Walther PPK while the music increases.
Bob Odenkirk takes a disastrous turn as a murderer who has turned into a cool guy who has returned to being a murderer in a role that is a male wish-fulfillment fantasy. The film suggests that the meek will not only inherit the Earth, they will machine-gun, slice, bomb and invade their way to it, all for the worship of their formerly taciturn wives and children.
The body count is in the hundreds and so far beyond the numbness that is comical at the end of this pale cousin of the “John Wick” films, which is no coincidence, since they share the same producers and writers, Derek Kolstad.
The film begins as a flashback, with Odenkirk as a suburban father in gentle ways trapped in a repetitive routine: working on a tool and dying, taking out the trash and going to work. He is ignored by his teenage son and his wife puts a pillow between them on the bed at night as a shock absorber. He used to be a federal killer, but he gave up on that life. Now your mojo is gone. “Do you remember who we were? I do, ”he says to his wife.
Then, a home invasion messes with the pan. He looks like an idiot for his inertia – “I was just trying to keep the damage to a minimum,” he explains to the police. But that puts him on a brutal path that results in the death of hundreds of stuntmen with a bad Russian accent. It turns out that your mojo is murder.
“Who are you?” someone asks. “Nobody,” he replies in his best stone Clint Eastwood. And yet, the impression is that the filmmakers want it to be everyone.
After avenging his family’s honor, Odenkirk’s sad, shattered husband encounters seven drunken bandits who threaten a woman on his bus. He attacks them brutally and bloodily – twice. Before leaving, he performs a tracheostomy on one of the boys with a straw for a fast-food drink. This guy ended up being the younger brother of a powerful Russian mobster and sociopath.
“Sorry about the mess,” he says to the bus driver.
The powerful Russian sociopath wants revenge, of course. One of his minions is not impressed, saying that Odenkirk “appears to be as vanilla as he looks”. The Russian responds by taking care of a “wolf in sheep’s clothing”. The subtext, we think, is never to judge: your neighbor with a beer belly and a hairstyle who drives a battered Honda Civic can only be 007 lying down.
In the face of what appears to be a few thousand armed goons, our hero must protect his family by going on the offensive. He asks for help from his own family – Christopher Lloyd plays his father; rapper RZA plays his foster brother. They are good with guns and their father, a retired FBI agent, says he misses sending the guys away. That love never goes away, does it?
For the big showdown, Odenkirk’s manly and manly man sets a series of deadly explosive traps like an adult Macaulay Culkin in “Home Alone”. When it is all over, your wife will pull the pillow and respect you. Wives often feel that way after their homes have been destroyed and a bandit has his face crushed by a kettle on a plate of fresh lasagna.
Director Ilya Naishuller simply loves slow-motion massacres, with our hero walking confidently while murdering scum to sweet, romantic music. We know this because he does it three different times with Louis Armstrong’s “What a Beautiful World”, Andy Williams’s “The Impossible Dream” and Rodgers-Hammerstein’s “You Never Walk Alone”. It’s a tiring trick, and Naishuller turned it into pulp, like most bad guys here.
Deaths are not elegant or inspired, just brutal. The script is not particularly funny or insightful, just brutal. The characters are as deep as a first-person “Call of Duty” video game. Even the screenwriter seems to be apologizing: When the last villain was dispatched, Lloyd says: “Just a little too much. But glorious. “
You’ve probably seen this before, if you’ve seen “Death Wish” or “Taken”. You have seen slow-motion bullets tearing weapons-carrying extras, twisting them in the air to make them look like spasmodic dancers. There is nothing new in this meaningless and mistaken mess. And violence as an aphrodisiac is not really what we wanted in 2021. Nobody does well in “Nobody”.
“Nobody”, a Universal Pictures release, is rated R for language and extreme violence. Running time: 91 minutes. Half star in four.
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R definition of MPAA: restricted. Children under the age of 17 require a parent or adult guardian to accompany them.
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Online: https://www.universalpictures.com/movies/nobody
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Mark Kennedy is in http://twitter.com/KennedyTwits