Bob Odenkirk’s Deadly Dad Remains a Delight in Nobody 2
In a Summer movie season where the usual crop of sequels, rebirths and reduxes occupy our screens, there’s a specific kind of nostalgia that Timo Tjahjanto’s Nobody 2 manages to evoke. Beyond the brutal violence and clever quips there’s a specific call-back to a type of film that flourished in the decades past, one that recognized fully that the specific joy of watching people get punched in the face doesn’t need to be wrapped in a dour or overly complex narrative.
Nobody 2 picks up soon after the last film, where the daily grind of suburban life of a former government killer is getting to our protagonist. We see Bob Odenkirk’s Hutch Mansell rising early to greet the day in his quiet neighborhood. As the kids shuttle off to school, and his wife tries to secure sales as a real estate agent, Hutch is tasked with paying off debts incurred in the last chapter when he immolated a whole pile of cash, forced to retrieve certain items or conduct a given mission while murdering many along the way.
Unfortunately, all this work is putting a strain on his relationship, and although he does his best to come home to join his wife for a planned dinner, one can never fully anticipate a slew of machete-wielding Brazilians that complicate a given task. Recognizing that he needs a better work/life balance, Hutch plans a family trip to a vintage waterpark that he visited in his youth, trying in his own ways to craft good shared memories between him and his brood at a locale that was one of his few happy places from childhood.
Naturally, things go awry, and Hutch is sucked into circumstances where he is incapable of being chill. An almost innocent ruckus at the fairground soon leads to a far grander criminal enterprise. From here things escalate to almost apocalyptic levels as the small-scale theme park becomes the highly-foreshadowed setting for pure mayhem.
It’s in Odenkirk’s fine turn as the reluctant avenger that he evokes the work of a legendary performer from the past. In the 1980s, Bruce Willis rose to the top of the action-hero game by continually illustrating a reluctance to get into a fight. He cut a handsome, follicularly-challenged figure, forming a fit yet not steroid-inflated physique in contrast to several of his blockbuster colleagues, presenting himself as an everyman character who just wants to spend some time with his family but is forced to murder a slew of henchmen before returning home for dinner.
In ways both overt and subtle, Bob Odenkirk manages to channel this same kind of charisma. The star of Better Call Saul and Mr. Show was never top-of-mind for his physical prowess, yet just like Willis, there’s a believability that when push comes to shove he’s a guy holding a lot of internal trauma who would get the job done when called to task.
Nobody 2 has plenty other welcome throwbacks to the films of decades past, from Back to the Future’s Christopher Lloyd as the goofy-yet-deadly father figure, Gladiator’s (and Rushmore’s!) Connie Neilson, the Wu-Tang Clan (and Ghost Dog stalwart) RZA, and the new addition of the ultimate ‘80s femme fatale, Sharon Stone, slicing up the scenery and her enemies with an unsettlingly gleeful grin on her face.
We even have a Hanks to sprinkle in, with the very capable Colin showing once again how he can evoke a dose of the on-screen chemistry that his dad helped develop while turning expectations on its head. He’s his own man, of course, but he looks enough like his beloved father to immediately elicit empathy, buttressed with the gift of slightly hardened features that make for a perfectly punchable face. This is a feature fans of his more round-faced father would never have stomached during his prime. While father settled into decades of leading man roles, Colin’s character actor charms make for extremely watchable portrayals, with the added benefit of a layer of believable sociopathy that’s a welcome aspect of his acting palate.
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