Yes, I totally admit that when I saw the first Nobody, I was completely caught up in the shameless, middle-aged, wish fulfillment of a story of a lowly dude with his best years behind him suddenly reclaiming his self worth by using his distant past as an assassin for the United States Intelligence Community to beat various thugs, yobs and criminal organisations to a bloody pulp. Further more, the sequence on the bus where Bob Odenkirk’s rumpled Hutch finally gets his mojo back by utterly destroying an unruly gang hit me almost like a religious experience – so when the sequel was announced, I was primed and ready to get more Nobody into my life, pronto.
There’s been a few changes, of course. The moody look of Ilya Naishuller’s original has been replaced by the summer colours of Indonesian director Timo Tjahjanto and the Mansells are now about to embark on a much needed family vacation, but can the sequel capture the same goofy aging angst of the first film, only with added flume rides and ball pits?
Since we last laid eyes on retired assassin Hutch Mansell, he’s been having to pay off a few debts after obliterating a Russian bank at the end of the last film. To pay off the sizable amount of money he burned up, he’s been going on ever more dangerous assignments for The Barber, but while this is admittedly sating his renewed desire for bloodlust, once again it’s his marriage that’s suffering. Spending one too many nights out late beating the shit out of various criminal fraternities, Becca is feeling lonely and unappreciated while Hutch’s son, Brady, is getting more and more aggressive at school as he starts to gradually take after his old man.
After a particularly dangerous mission nearly goes sideways, Hutch puts his foot down with employers and his family – it’s time for a vacation and the place he’s chosen is the holiday resort he went to as a child with his father and brother, Plummerville. Gathering up the family unit, the Mansell’s head off to a week away from from the usual drudgery of work, school and murdering an elevator full of henchmen to soak up some sun, enjoy the water park and enjoy some complimentary hotdogs. But after an altercation kicks off at the local arcade between Brady and the son of the resort, Hutch once again goes off the deep end when an overzealous security guard smacks his daughter, Sammy, upside the head which sets off the usual chain reaction of bullets and body parts.
You see, the park’s owner, Wyatt, and the town’s corrupt sheriff, Abel, both answer to the frankly terrifying Lendina, a crime boss who depends on the resort as a bootlegging route for her various criminal endeavours. Once again suddenly in the middle of a chaotic situation, Hutch seems happier than a pig in shit, but what if all this violent blowback has even more of a negative effect on his family?
I’ve gotta say, while Nobody 2 has all the violent slapstick and wanton destruction you could ask for in an action comedy, I was left feeling a little let down by this zippy, but scrappier sequel. Maybe I was feeling a little frustrated because the trailers amusingly riffed heavily on making it feel like it was going to be National Lampoon’s Vacation but with more compound fractures – Christ, the trailer even employed the song “Holiday Road” by Lindsey Buckingham that fronted the 1983 comedy classic, so you can’t blame me for being hopeful. However, while the song doesn’t actually appear anywhere in Nobody 2, there’s also a sense that the jokes are a bit too scattershot to really nail those big, belly laughs I was hoping for.
For a start, while Timo Tjahjanto is a talented director of many of a deranged action sequence, there’s a sense that there’s something of a disconnect with the more subtle moments humour that suggests the filmmaker is struggling slightly with the timing which provides plenty of snickers, but a surprising lack of bombastic laughs to really send the movie over the top. What certainly doesn’t help is that even though Tjahjanto acquits himself well with the action, the scenes set around the frenzied act of violence prove to be so badly written you start to wonder if the movie skipped the script entirely and just shot from the original treatment.
The entire thread featuring Connie Nielsen’s lonely wife is added to try and add some genuine story among the stabbings and shootings, but it’s eventually dropped with a minimum of fuss when the movie has no need for it. Similarly, Christopher Lloyd has nothing much to do as Hutch’s garishly shirted dad and virtually all of his lines are bizarrely unintelligible either due to the actor’s age or maybe some joke I just didn’t get and an underused RZA as Hutch’s brother shows up once again for the final battle for no other reason that he gets to swing a katana around.
Swinging things over to the villain contingent and things aren’t much better. John Ortiz as the owner of the holiday park is rather surplus to requirements, while Colin Hanks’ sleazy, yet underplayed sheriff could have done with being a bit more unhinged to fit the tone better, while Sharon Stone’s uber-baddie is so over the top, she actually could have benefited from being calmed down a little bit from the flurry of villain tics and non-stop f-bombs that she radiates in all directions – although, she can keep the frenzied dancing to German hip hop though, because it looks like she’s having a fucking ball.
While it seems that I’m being very down on Nobody 2, and it genuinely is a step down from the original, what manages to save the film are two things. The first is that when Tjahjanto is allowed to stay in his lane, the result is great and while there’s nothing here that can touch the that resplendent bus scene from the first film, a finger-slicing brawl on a duck boat proves to be hefty amounts of fun. Also, the finale throws in the odd great gag or two with a gunfight commencing down a waterslide climaxing in a fairly spectacular boobytrap and you can’t go wrong with a landmine in a ballpit, can you?
However, once again, the glue that holds Nobody together proves to be the hangdog expression that’s fixed on Odenkirk’s face that switches when some cocky idiot starts some shit they can’t finish and it never seems to get dull. Now pitching his unlikely action hero as someone who now has become something of a sizable chaos magnet no matter how hard he tries to to keep beast within contained to purely professional work, the actor juggles the act of being trapped between doing the decent thing and breaking some teeth to subdue an asshole wonderfully.
Disappointingly inferior to the first movie, Nobody 2 still manages to deliver just enough of the good stuff to make it worthwhile thanks mainly to Odenkirk being on top form and Tjahjanto being given some funky toys to play with. However, if Hutch returns for a Nobody 3, can we please focus on the writing a little bit more otherwise it might all dissolve into just another, slapdash action franchise – and nobody wants to see that…
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