Bob Odenkirk effectively plays against type, but that doesn’t stop Nobody from becoming a generic action thriller that lavishes in its violence and fails to engross with its story.
Formula is a given in Hollywood, and Nobody is about as formulaic an action film as you will find. It’s premise of a middle-class family man who is actually a trained and dangerous killer, was first made popular back in 1996 with Renny Harlin’s The Long Kiss Goodnight. Since then, a deluge of movies have fallen suit: Taken, Mr and Mrs Smith, Killers, The Equalizer. The action scenes are the same, the stakes banal, the conclusions predictable.
Where Nobody differentiates is in its casting. Bob Odenkirk is in no way an action hero. At 58 years old, Odenkirk’s long and prolific career began as a writer with stints on Saturday Night Live, before establishing himself as an on-screen talent in the TV crime drama Breaking Bad and its spin off Better Call Saul. In Nobody, Odenkirk plays the part of downtrodden family man Dutch very well, bringing a dry sense of humour and melancholy to his characters banal suburban existence. This includes being married to real estate agent Becca (Connie Nelson), and father to moody teen Blake (Gage Munroe) and adorable daughter Abby (Paisley Cadorath.)
It often feels like director Ilya Naishuller (Hardcore Henry) and writer Derek Kolstad (John Wick) have watched Sam Mendes’ 1999 drama American Beauty one too many times in their depiction of suburban life as a repressive environment that’s slave to a never-ending routine. In the case of Nobody, salvation, of course is found through violence, with Dutch embracing his inner killer after a home robbery leaves him feeling impotent as a man and protector. Soon he is laying waste to the scum of the Earth, among them a group of Russians who Dutch pulverises with extreme prejudice.
This leads to another generic plot-point: the Russian antagonist. With the Italian mob no longer relevant and the Mexican cartels used only in films south of the border, the Russian’s have become the token baddie for these films, and Nobody uses this trope to banal effect. The films main villain Yulian Keznetsov (Aleksey Setebryakov) at least is introduced as a character of promise, a Karaoke loving night club owner who is tired of the gangster life. It doesn’t take long for Yulian to join the rest of the mugging, sadistically violent Russian brutes that came before him, and no doubt will follow.
It all comes down to the biggest issue with Nobody: its stakes, especially regarding violence. Not once during the films 92-minute runtime does it feel like any of the characters, most of all Dutch, are in danger, so callous and dispensable the application and consequences of all matter of violence, from knife-strikes to fisticuffs to gunplay. Blood is shed at such a routine click and bodies stacked to the size of towers, yet in this environment where to kill bears no moral weight and where to die has little ramification, it is hard to invest in Nobody if nothing is at stake.
In its place are action scenes that while loud and bloody, do not impress in their choreography or in the almost-pornographic way in which Naishuller frames his shots. To be blunt, and somewhat lazy, we’ve seen it all before, but done better. Nobody is nothing special.
