Nobody Review

What's utterly fascinating is how violence is OK if the mayhem ends with a wink. The 2018 remake of "Death Wish" was trashed by critics (today sitting at an 18% on Rotten Tomatoes), yet "Nobody," at the time of this writing, has a 79% on Rotten Tomatoes. Why is that? Both released shortly after a tragic public shooting, a fact critics couldn't help but have on their minds while writing their reviews. Film criticism is subjective of course, and who knows? Maybe "Nobody" is just that much a better film? Perhaps "Death Wish" talked gun politics instead of just showing guns in action? I don't have those answers- I dunno, I thought those were pretty good questions.

It's not entirely fair to compare these two pictures, despite the fact that "Nobody" owes a large part of its narrative to the franchise that made Charles Bronson a star in the seventies as it does the recent "John Wick" movies. In fact it's written by the creator of the Keanu Reeves pictures, Derek Kolstad, who's script probably looked a lot like this:

Bang bang. Punch punch. Bad guy dead. Good guy alive. Good guy curls his left eyebrow. Next scene

It doesn't contain nearly as much humor to push it into parody territory, but any film willing to have Christopher Lloyd walk around with a shotgun blasting guys a third his age is not playing it totally straight.

The actual plot is vague and loose, with Bob Odenkirk playing Hutch Mansell, a boring family guy who, after his house is burglarized, is patronized by his son, coworker, neighbor and it gets to him. Turns out he's an ex-auditor, which is movie-speak for what amounts to "a government hitman." His itchy trigger finger eventually gets to him, and soon he rides the bus looking to trouble, and finds it quickly, putting the punks in the hospital. Turns out one of them is the younger brother of a Russian drug lord, and well, uh, that's the movie. What follows are a lot of fisticuffs and gunfights, stylized like the Wick films and every bit as brutal.

This means of course the action is easy to follow, frequent and generally thrilling, but it's all been seen before. Hutch booby traps his office like 2019's "Rambo: Last Blood," and blood, limbs and body flies in all directions, all onscreen. And I rooted for it, every moment of it. Action movies and thrillers have long suffered from overstuffed spectacle, and for all its cinematic familiarity, it's still refreshing to see humans in front of a camera on an actual set instead of greenscreens.

I'm giving "Nobody" three-stars because it does what it sets out to do: entertain. I cannot endorse that the violence onscreen is in good taste, in general or in light of recent events, and I certainly won't advise anyone to step into a theater during a pandemic. But it accomplishes its modest goal with modest success; this is not your dad's "Death Wish," only it's exactly that, and you'll probably enjoy it just as much.