Has there ever been a fantasy quite as potent for the audience of action movies as the one where an ordinary schlub gets to uncork the bottled-up rage of his humdrum existence, smashing open ennui’s skull with a roll of nickels? “Nobody,” directed by Ilya Naishuller, starts as a sneaky parody of that everyman’s power fantasy but quickly escalates into its apotheosis — a well-lubricated, pyrotechnic hoot that leaves the faint whiff of gunpowder and absurdity drifting over the popcorn aisles.
Has there ever been a fantasy quite as potent for the audience of action movies as the one where an ordinary schlub gets to uncork the bottled-up rage of his humdrum existence, smashing open ennui’s skull with a roll of nickels? “Nobody,” directed by Ilya Naishuller, starts as a sneaky parody of that everyman’s power fantasy but quickly escalates into its apotheosis — a well-lubricated, pyrotechnic hoot that leaves the faint whiff of gunpowder and absurdity drifting over the popcorn aisles.
And at the film’s molten core: Bob Odenkirk. No winking here; his transition from defeated doughboy to house-wrecking hurricane lands with the grace of a slapstick chaplain masquerading as a brawler. I came to “Nobody” already inoculated by the toothache anxieties of Novocaine — that other Odenkirk vehicle where the banality of suburban virtue unspools into criminal chaos — and the comparison only makes this latest transformation all the more exhilarating. Here we’re miles from the clenched-jaw stoicism of a Statham or a Bronson; Odenkirk’s Hutch Mansell is the man in the office cubicle you pass in the parking lot, the one who might just have C4 stuck under his coffee cup.
The plot isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel so much as affix spinning rims: we’ve met men like Hutch before — the domesticated predator forced back into the wild by an invasion too personal to ignore. But Odenkirk, all slouch and sigh in the first reel, shows how the trivial degradations of family and routine stack up until one day, when the right Russian thug breaks into the house, the dam bursts.
The family dynamics give the violence its piquant aftertaste. Connie Nielsen, as the weary wife, manages to be both audience surrogate and emotional gauge; her scenes register the confusion of living with a powder keg disguised as a pushover. RZA shows up to bring a cool, knowing jolt to the brother act, but Christopher Lloyd — now officially America’s geriatric grenade — emerges as the film’s secret weapon. When this silver-haired retiree lays out bad guys with a shotgun, you can hear the delighted yelp of a generation raised on Back to the Future morphing into something more primal: the glee of watching grandpa unretire to rain hellfire.
Is the Russian crime boss a grand cliché, a vodka-swilling cartoon with too many teeth? Of course. But there’s a reason fairy tales insist on their ogres. Aleksei Serebryakov, by preening and snarling with gusto, lets Hutch’s earnestness shimmer against the carnivalesque grotesquery of villainy.
Underneath the bravura smash-ups, “Nobody” is doing a little moral shadowboxing about masculinity and transformation — the human willingness to swap comfort for carnage if given the excuse. Hutch sits out the first home invasion and is briefly pilloried for his “cowardice,” but in the next breath he’s an avenging fury, as if the entire film is an anti-anxiety ad for the violence lurking behind the minivan.
There’s more than a little John Wick in these DNA strands — right down to the mythos of the “professional who tried to get out” — but where Wick is mythic cool, Odenkirk’s Hutch is closer to the front-row dad rooting through his toolbox for the right screwdriver (or landmine). In the sardonic circus of blood, the film finds a pulse — channeling the wholesome traps of Home Alone through a berserker’s rage, then flipping the joke by showing us who really gets to walk away.
Director Naishuller, who seems to film with one foot on the accelerator and one hand flicking the audience the finger, orchestrates the mayhem as if he’s auditioning for a spot in the bullet ballet Olympics. The set pieces are punchy, gloriously over-choreographed; the violence is too kinetic to be real, yet somehow it stings. Every broken table and shattered pane gleams with comic bravado.
There’s real pleasure in the way the soundtrack surges and the camera ducks and weaves through each battle — the humor and horror working in tandem. Even as the action grows outlandish, you’re never allowed to drift into the numbness these make-’em-bleed movies so often induce: Nobody is refreshingly aware of its own madness, and it grins through its split lip all the way to the end.
Sure, the plot is as old as vengeance itself. The beats are familiar enough to sketch half-asleep, and if you’ve seen one redemption-by-blood bath you may think you’ve seen them all. But “Nobody” wraps itself in cliché like a comfort blanket, only to leap from underneath with a pie in the face. The very predictability becomes a kind of high-spirited dance — as if to say, You know what’s coming, but you’ve never quite seen it with this much oddball glee.
Is it art? Maybe not. But it’s a marvelously vigorous piece of pop carnage, and Odenkirk’s star-is-born turn is both punchline and punch. “Nobody” invites you to believe in the wild, burlesque daydream that even the anonymous among us — the men and women lost in the lines at the DMV or skulking through PTA meetings — might, when given a good enough reason, rewrite the laws of suburban physics with a single well-aimed uppercut.
So, if you need to exorcise your frustrations or simply want to revel in the spectacle of a nobody proving he’s the most dangerous man in the room, take a seat, unbuckle your cynicism, and hang on. Because “Nobody” is anything but forgettable.
