Nobody Review

In a cinematic landscape of big CGI blockbusters and superheroes, the film Nobody was a wonderfully violent, small-scale offering from the action genre.

Hutch Mansell (Bob Odenkirk) is a seemingly ordinary man: he lives in the suburbs with his wife and two kids, has an office job and keeps forgetting to put the trash out. But he also has a deep dark secret: he used to be a secret agent who did the American government’s dirty work and he struggles not to reuse his skills. After one humiliation too many Hutch releases the beast and ends up with more trouble than he bargained for after he fights the brother of a Russian mob boss.

Nobody was advertised as being from the makers of John Wick. Nobody was written by the John Wick writer Derek Kolstad and David Leitch acted as a producer of Nobody and the first John Wick film. Nobody does share a lot of similarities to the first John Wick film because both films follow badass assassins who have quit the game, end up confronting an arsehole which leads to launching a one-man war, and both films had their tongue firmly in cheek. Even though Nobody and John Wick were made by different directors and had different distributors, they felt like they were set in the same universe.

The big selling point of Nobody was its action. The film does have a slow build-up but once it gets started it’s incredible. The first action sequence was the one on the bus fight and it was an excellent piece of hand-to-hand fighting in a cramped location. Like John Wick, Hutch is a badass but he is still vulnerable. He gets stabbed and he’s bruised and limping by the end of the fight. The action only escalates from there with the final action being wonderfully insane fun. My own vocabulary devolved as I marvelled at all the bloodletting.

Nobody was made on a low budget for an action film. It only cost $16 million. Because of this some of the action was limited. Many of the action sequences take place in tight locations like a bus and a house. The final action scene was when the film was a little more expansive. What Nobody lacked in scale it made up for it with intensity and violence and that’s enough to please my lizard brain.

Odenkirk was an unexpected choice to play the action hero. He is best known for playing Saul Goodman in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul and his film roles have been in comedies and dramas. Odenkirk was an unexpected action hero because of his average build and is in his late-50s, and that was the point of the character. Odenkirk was able to be both intimidating and humorous: an example of this was when he said, ‘give me the goddamn kitty cat bracelet, motherfucker!’

Nobody was a film that had a sense of humour. It opened with Hutch handcuffed, opening a tin of tuna for a kitten and a cop asking him “who the fuck are you?” It shows the kind of film audiences would be in for. The instigating incident that started Hutch’s rampage was trying to find his daughter’s kitty cat bracelet and the film had a running joke where Hutch tells people about his old line of work for them to rudely die.

Whilst there have been a lot of comparisons to John Wick, Nobody can be compared to one other film: A History of Violence. Nobody and A History of Violence had a similar premise: both focused on former assassins who have settled down to have a quiet life but an incident forces them back into their former lives. Both films showed men who tried to control their violent urges. However, there were two big differences. The first was A History of Violence had a more serious tone. The other difference was Hutch wanted to let the beast out. Despite Hutch feeling alive by violence, he did have a moral code and he did have a sweet relationship with his young daughter.

Nobody was simply a fun and cathartic action film. Fans of films of R-Rated action films will get a kick out of it.