If you have avoided watching the trailer (it is just a wee bit back up there) then you may not know what type of film this is.
It’s not hard to work out, really. Loads of over the top violence, gunplay foreplay and characters with stupid names doing stupid things. No, we are not talking about the billionth F&F, but rather the Bob Odenkirk actioner that Nobody (geddit) really needed.
However, if you peel back the layers of this movie onion you can get below the surface of what on the face of it is yet another raging male beats up hundreds of people half his age. You see, Ilya Naishuller’s masculinity-in-crisis movie is supposed to be a critique of the male’s need to be masculine.
Hutch Mansell is stuck in a rut. Routine upon routine. Lost on a sea of blah blah blah. Like every, everyman, he dreams of excitement and intrigue.
After burglars attempt to rob his house, while his family are home, Hutch lets them go...oddly, resistant to meting out some good old-fashioned ass-whupping. You, see, Mansell has a super violent history, one which he has bottled up for years. A bus ride altercation leads to a run in with The Russian Mob (doesn’t it always) and Hutch’s blue-touch paper is lit.
As you might have expected the screenplay comes from Derek Kolstad, he of thee mega-successful John Wick series and Odenkirk’s hero is a wronged man with a secret past. Here though, in the wish-fulfillment stakes, Odenkirk is slightly more relative to most bored middle-agers than the freaklishly un-aging Reeves, even if the ‘particular set of skills’ his Hutch Mansell brandishes are, quite frankly, ridiculous, the film is knowing without being clumsy.
Violent, yet obviously so, and never gratifying, Nobody is better than you may have feared and Odenkirk out Neeson’s Liam while also suggesting that J.Wick may want to think twice.
Perfect weekend viewing, then.
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