Movie Breakdown: Nobody (Noah)
Pre-Screening Stance:
It looks like John Wick but with an older, more suburban family man in the role of Super Killer Who Now Lives In Secrecy. And nothing about this description makes me unexcited for this film.
Post-Screening Ramble:
Nobody isn’t exactly a John Wick clone, it’s an inversion. Where John Wick found its titular character only willing to engage with his dark past when it is forcibly pulled from him, Nobody finds Bob Odenkirk’s Hutch Mansell – a former super killer – sinking into the domestic oblivion of suburban adulthood, yearning for his days as an authorized mass murdered. His children don’t respect him anymore, his wife no longer sleeps with him, he spends his day spinning along the treadmill of his own contained existence until a pair of unsuspecting robbers break into his house, rekindling his want of doing painfully physical things to bad people. With the pilot light flickering, Hutch dives back into his special skillset and gets to work hurting the people who need to get hurt. Where Wick is dragged back into the fray, Hutch Mansell dives back in to make his life mean something. It’s a weighty idea – willfully reengaging with violence to put some kick back in your step – but not one that director Ilya Nalshuller or writer Derek Kolstad (he of John Wick fame) seem to care too much about. This is a lengthy fight scene broken up by the briefest moments of characterization, a hour and a half rumble with occasional pauses to let characters breath. It is a slight piece of cartoonish ultra-violence that wants nothing more than to see Bob Odenkirk get the living shit kicked out of him. And on that it delivers. Nalshuller’s action scenes are slickly shot but rawly choreographed around Odenkirk’s Hutch getting beaten badly but beating his opponents just that much worse. Each fight scene is bigger, more brutal, more populated, until Nobody is fighting what feels like a literal army with a bunch of shit he purchased at a Home Depot. It’s a breathless film, one scene teetering into the next, and I don’t suggest you take too much time to think about it during or after for fear the gritty flicker of joy the film brings up won’t withstand it.
One Last Thought:
Again, if you’ve been watching Better Call Saul and have developed a fetish for watching Bob Odenkirk get roughed up, well, this is the film for you. I paused after the first main fight scene and truly wondered how anyone could walk (even run) away from the ass-kicking Hutch takes of his own volition.
