Mark Reviews Movies: NOBODY (2021)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 25, 2021

When the man says he's "nobody," we believe him. That goes a long way in Nobody, a clever-enough action film that has enough ingenuity in its actual action to make up for its overly-familiar plot. It also possesses, as the eponymous nobody, Bob Odenkirk, a seemingly unlikely action-movie hero whose unlikeliness serves as a square punch to the arm for this material.

Odenkirk isn't a traditional movie star, and he's definitely not the kind of actor one would expect to appear in a film like this one. He knows it. The film knows it. This against-the-type casting, though, isn't played a joke. Known mostly for his strange brand of comedy and for playing a particularly slimy character on a pair of popular TV shows, Odenkirk doesn't have the physique or presence of the actors we think of when we think "action hero," the agility to pull off the more free-wheeling type of action that has become the norm as of late, or the matinee-star good looks of some recognizable and/or disposable actor in any given festival of violence.

These observations are not intended and should not be taken as insults about the actor. One doubts that the filmmakers or even Odenkirk himself would wholly disagree with any of those statements. They wouldn't have made this particular film if they did.

Here, Odenkirk plays Hutch Mansell, a seemingly and sadly ordinary man simply going through his monotonous daily grind. Director Ilya Naishuller presents that slog in a montage of day after day of routines—cooking, work, chores—and days becoming weeks of the same schedule, the same customs, and the same little disappointments pointing toward some bigger emptiness. It all speeds up toward nothing.

Hutch is married to Becca (Connie Nielsen) in a seemingly loveless marriage (A wall of pillows separates them in bed at night). They have two kids, a teenage son (played by Gage Munroe) who keeps his father at a distance and a younger daughter (played by Paisley Cadorath) who adores him.

Hutch works as an accountant at a small factory owned by his father-in-law (played by Michael Ironside). There's some tension in that Becca's family—her father and brother (played by Billy MacLellan)—served and saw combat in the military, while Hutch served as a bookkeeper of sorts.

All of that comes to the fore when two people break into Hutch's house one night. Hutch appeases them with what little he has, and when his son gets the drop on one of the robbers, he freezes before whacking the other with a golf club. The son gets punched in the face, and Hutch gets a constant punch to his ego for refusing to respond with violence.

The twist here, of course, is that Hutch could have acted. Indeed, he might have during another period of his life. He noticed a few things, though. The robbers were scared and desperate. The gun they had wasn't loaded.

Hutch noticed these things, because he was trained to do so—way back in the day, when he worked for a secret branch of one of the alphabet agencies. He couldn't make arrests, so Hutch was the guy they brought in to make certain no one was left to be arrested. He was a professional government assassin, in other words—retired, now, and miserable, too.

The rest of the story, obviously, has Hutch choosing and, later, being forced to bring back the violent spark of his past life. He goes after the robbers. He confronts a group of loud, intimidating guys on a bus late at night. That brings a Russian gangster named Yulian (Alexey Serebryakov), in charge of overseeing and protecting the mafia's retirement fund, into the mix, looking for revenge against a complete nobody—albeit one whose government file is filled with streaks of black marker.

There's nothing new or particularly engaging about this plot, written by Derek Kolstad. The plot, though, isn't the point. It's the notion of Hutch, as a tired and unsatisfied man, beaten down by life and everyone's low opinion of him, who takes control of things by asserting himself upon the situation. Of course, that's not new, either, but in the casting of Odenkirk, the material certainly seems fresh.

The important thing is that Odenkirk plays all of this straight—without winking—and with a completely down-to-earth sense of realism. We might expect, for example, that Hutch's return to violence might transform him—his attitude, his personality, his outlook on life. Throughout the film, though, Odenkirk maintains that sense of underlying malaise, as if all of this action is just a return to an older, different type of routine. He doesn't suddenly become stronger or braver or more confident. His relationships are still messy, and there's no moment when Hutch and Becca re-discover the spark of their romance. They just—if one can believe it—start talking a little bit more.

Then, there's the action, which begins in earnest with the brutal fight on the bus, where Hutch takes almost as many hits as he gives. Surely, this would be the case for a guy who has avoided such activities for a long time. The fact that Naishuller and Kolstad don't make their action hero a master of violence from the start instantly raises the stakes of what's to come, by grounding it in a sense of pseudo-reality.

The rest of the action is energetic, smartly choreographed, and, especially during the climax (set in the now-booby-trapped factory), plenty violent, gory, and, on a disturbing level, effective. Nobody might have worked on these merits to one degree or another without Odenkirk in the leading role, but there's little denying his presence and performance here elevate the material beyond what it might have been.

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