Better Cull Saul, anyone? For a decade or so now, as Jimmy ‘Saul Goodman’ McGill in both Breaking Bad and its prequel, Better Call Saul, Bob Odenkirk has made talking — invariably of the fast variety — his way out of danger into an art form. When the bullets start to fly, he’ll be found running as fast as he can in the opposite direction.
That all changes with the rollocking ride that is Nobody, in which Odenkirk makes a late bid for geriaction-hero status. By the end of Ilya Naishuller’s movie, Odenkirk has racked up a body count around the triple figure mark. He is the danger. He is the one who knocks.
That Odenkirk — with able assistance from Naishuller’s inventive staging and the action aces of David Leitch and Chad Stahelski’s gang of cunning stunts at 87North — can cut (and shoot, and stab) the mustard is deeply impressive. It would have been easy to turn this into a parody of action films, and have the central joke be that Odenkirk’s formidable-assassin-turned-family-man Hutch Mansell is woefully out of shape, wheezing his way through fight scenes. And there is a little of that, particularly in his first outing, in which he gets as good as he gives during an intervention on public transport. Otherwise, as Hutch gets back into the swing of things, he shows a yen for meting out punishment that makes John Wick look about as intimidating as a branch of Wickes.
There’s a cartoonish quality, and even a lightness of touch, to the violence.
Invoking Wick’s name is not an accident. Not only does Leitch, who co-directed the first of the Keanu Reeves action series, produce here, but the two films share a writer: Derek Kolstad. And there’s quite a bit of shared DNA, from the basic premise to the Russian bad guys. What makes this more than just a loose remake is in the tone. While Odenkirk, deliberately, isn’t running off his motormouth, this is so much funnier than the Wick movies which, for all their stylish gunplay, have a tendency to disappear up their immaculately tailored backsides. There’s a cartoonish quality, and even a lightness of touch, to the violence in Nobody that might disappoint anyone looking for a soul-searching treatise on vigilantism and the corrosive nature of vengeance.
This will leave some cold, while its central message, that all your problems can be solved by standing up for yourself and beating the shit out of anything that moves, is on the slightly problematic side. It’s also absolutely criminal to let Odenkirk and the likes of Christopher Lloyd have fun with guns, while leaving Connie Nielsen on the sidelines in a barely written role as Hutch’s wife. But the whole thing moves so quickly it’s hard to find time to lament these failings; plus, there are lashings of style (Aleksey Serebryakov’s bad guy gets an entrance for the ages), a great soundtrack (including a needle drop that will please fans of one football team in particular), and Odenkirk at his most infectiously charismatic. And if that still doesn’t work for you, there’s a cute kitten too.
