What if John Wick was a bit more of an everyman, with a wife and kids, working a standard middle management job? That is essentially the starting point for recently released Nobody, starring the multi-talented Bob Odenkirk (Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad) as the ultimate mild-mannered middle-class dad.
The Daily Grind
Nobody kicks off by introducing us to the mundane daily life of Hutch Mansell. We see him experience the typical annoyances of missing the trash man by a few seconds, punching the clock at his father-in-law’s manufacturing company, crunching numbers in Excel every day, and going home to his wife and two kids. Hutch seems to be going through the motions at work, although he seems very connected to his young daughter.
Things take a turn with a home invasion, with two low-level criminals breaking into the Mansell family home, stealing spending money and a few trinkets. Hutch seems very calm about the whole situation and quietly picks up a golf club clearly intent on taking out the invaders. But, his teenage son gets into a struggle with one gunman and Hutch chooses to stand down and stay in character as the milquetoast character we’ve met. His son and wife are disappointed in his lack of ability to stand up and protect the family. But, even if we didn’t know a bit of what is coming, you could see something simmering inside the mild-mannered dad.
When Hutch learns that the thieves may have taken his daughter’s kitty-kat bracelet, something changes in his demeanor. He heads to his father’s retirement home and retrieves a gun from a box that also contains a bunch of money and various fake IDs. Again, we have to question who Hutch really is. He begins a search for the robbers, based on a tattoo he saw on one of them. This eventually tracks down the husband and wife thieves but stops short of killing them when he sees they have a baby in the other room. Frustrated, he grabs a bus home. But, when a bunch of drunken idiots get on the bus and start harassing a woman, Hutch seems to make a decision. He initially pulls his gun, but then proceeds to beat the daylights out of them, as he seems to almost be remembering how to fight as the scene proceeds. The fight puts the entire crew into the hospital, with one only alive because Hutch stops to clear his airway before leaving the bus. It turns out that thug is the brother of a vicious Russian crime lord, who demands vengeance.
I’m Nobody
This leads to the reveal that Hutch isn’t Hutch at all. In fact, we don’t really know what his name is. When he worked for the CIA as their ultimate problem solver, he was simply called Nobody. Nobody spent his career cleaning up messes, making people disappear, and generally being a one-man hit squad. As his skills return, the action escalates with the crime lord hot on his trail. When that leads to another much more violent home invasion, Hutch calmly puts his family in the basement and goes to work taking the crew of assassins apart. He eventually gets his family in a car and sends them out of town to safety, asking them to trust him and he will explain everything once this is all over. With his family out of harm’s way, we learn a bit more about how Hutch retired from his government clean-up work in search of simple down-to-earth happiness. But, he admits in a hilarious conversation he is having with a bunch of dead and dying assassins that he may have overcorrected a bit in trying to tone down his violent tendencies.
His elderly father is the next target but proves to be more than a match for the two assassins who visit his room at the retirement home. It starts to look like Hutch was just taking on the family business from what we learn of his father and brother in the final scenes as they help him take down the crime lord in spectacular fashion.
A Spin on John Wick
The action sequences and even some plot points borrow heavily from movies like John Wick but do it in a way that makes them seem like an homage to those previous action thrillers, rather than a rip-off of their ideas. The action is intense, visceral, and wonderfully amusing in many cases. Odenkirk is extremely fun to watch in the role as he changes from everyman to trained killer in a way that feels very natural. In all those ways it is more successful than a film like Gunpowder Milkshake.
Watch it or Not?
If you liked any of the John Wick movies, then I am almost certain you will like Nobody. It’s a fun over-the-top action movie with some strong performances as it goes through a predictable, but entertaining plot.
