Nobody 2

Prequel: “Nobody” (2021)

“When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations—the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you—and when the Lord your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them and show them no mercy.” —Deuteronomy 7:1-3

“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” —Mike Tyson

Bob Odenkirk, who plays Hutch Mansell in “Nobody 2,” has a long, linear and melancholic countenance, one tailor-made to take on suffering. But it’s a face that feels out of its element when put front and center on a big screen. Lacking the glimmer of a traditional movie star, Odenkirk’s every guy persona has been suited more to television than to cinema. So, his recent performance as Shelley Levine in the Broadway revival of “Glengarry Glen Ross” surprised me. He applied subtle and sensitive humor in ways that tempered the dire pathos of sad sack salesman, Shelley Levine. Amidst a group of mostly miscast actors, Odenkirk proved himself a standout. He carried the play.

Carrying a movie, however, has proven elusive to Odenkirk. He hits a lot of bullseyes when his scriptwriter puts a gun in his hand, but as a stand-up, stand-tall, stand-alone film protagonist he misses the target.

The first “Nobody”, released during the Covid pandemic, became a surprise hit. I found little to like in that movie, agreeing wholeheartedly with Spotlight’s critic, Alexander Malsan, whose criticism of the film as unoriginal and gratuitously violent was spot on. I considered its action to be as plastic as the stolen cat bracelet Hutch’s daughter lost, the corny pull-at-the-heartstrings toss-in that spurred the ensuing mayhem, mostly a blur of blood and gunpowder. The script rolled out one cliché after another. How many times do we have to watch the movie good guy face a bus-full (or a subway-full or a roadhouse-full) of thugs, whose IQs are inversely proportional to the number of tattoos they sport, shout schoolyard taunts, gang up on their would-be victim and take turns being taken down like bowling pins?

That film’s only redeeming feature was the family subplot in which Hutch’s marriage re-ignites after he exchanges his office staple guns for some shiny 357 Magnums. With each new facial scar and each new body bruise, his wife Becca (Connie Nielsen) warms to him, and his marriage comes back from the brink. She’s a quiet Lady Macbeth whose pleas to put “courage to the sticking point” are mostly requests to take out the garbage and do the dishes, but her entreaties must have worked because this time around Hutch is better at doing his household chores, getting the trashcan to the curb on time and cooking up a decent lasagna.

The plot in “Nobody 2” is for the most part a replica of the first film. I was enthused to hear that Timo Tjahjanto was taking over the reins as director. I liked his Indonesian horror film, “May the Devil Take You,” which was odd and ghoulish, but often piercingly honest about the dangers of the occult and unashamed to allude to Christian themes. Unfortunately, the director sticks to the formula that made the first Nobody film a commercial success, and hoping for less of the same, I sadly got a lot more of it.

Many of the shoot-em-up action scenes play like silent film cop and robber loops while others have the hypnotic redundancy of a machine-gunning video game, one whose forces advance over a bridge only to be summarily blown to bits by AK-47s. Sequel number two feels more like episode 2 or episode 22 of a cheap TV crime drama: same people, same plot, same ending; even the sets are repetitive. The makers of those programs counted on us forgetting the details of the previous week’s show. So do the makers of this film who mistreat us to the a lot of what we saw last time: assorted mayhem in garages and warehouses, another “filled with goons” bus scene (this time on a boat shaped like a duck), and even a repeat of a burning pile of cash.

That bonfire might have stoked some chills and some payback kudos, but it left Hutch thirty million dollars in debt to the Russians mobsters who owned that pile. I’m not sure who exactly demanded that pound of flesh since it seemed a given that the whole mob was taken out in the last movie. Hutch is now employed by a kind of assassination temp agency, and the irregular job hours have taken a toll on him and his family. Fulfilling those kill contracts gets in the way of attending his son’s basketball games and his own promises to take over more dinner duties. He decides that he and his family need a vacation, a week or so away from it all. His employer, however, is skeptical: “this job is in your nature, and nature always wins.”

Hutch takes his family to a rural water and amusement park called Plummerville which is equal parts bucolic and tacky, rustic Yellowstone meets retro Polynesian. The restorative getaway turns rakish rather quickly as the Mansell family encounters that the park and its surrounding town are a front for criminal activity, an all-purpose cartel that makes Cartagena look like Disneyland. There is a corrupt sheriff (Colin Hanks in a bumbling performance), a sinister son (John Ortiz, a little less robotic than Hanks) of the town’s founder, and Lendina, a crime boss played to maximum camp effect by Sharon Stone. Hair slicked back, donning black satin and black heels (maybe they’re cloven hooves), and cuddling a French bulldog puppy, she is just what the movie needs, and just in the nick of time. Stone is campy, over-the-top, and a scene stealer of unforgivable proportions. She is marvelous.

Hutch becomes the new mob’s target after he gets himself involved in an arcade scuffle. A guy who takes things personally, he is more outraged by a petty slight than he is by something perhaps a bit more bothersome, say grievous bodily harm. Never slow to anger, he tries to temper his acts of mutilation and murder by shrugging and sighing: “Sorry, honey, I lost it.”

Tjahjanto heaps a bevy of violent action scenes on us, but not a variety. Those interludes turn to running gags early in the film, although some of the rip-offs from films such as “The Lady from Shanghai” (I did get a kick out of the fun house mirror scene), “Strangers on a Train” and even the morbid classic, “Two Thousand Maniacs” perked up the splish-splash rhythm of most of the fight sequences. The director displayed a good sense of choreographic violence in his 2018 martial arts film, “The Night Comes for Us,” a talent I wish he had tapped for this film. I felt cheated by the scene in which Hutch has his finger sliced off and watches it fall over the rail of that duck boat and into the gaping mouth of a fish in the river below. I was sure that Hutch would dive into the water, catch the fish, and retrieve his digit. Tjahjanto has it in him to carry off a crazy scene like that, to put the absurd on par with the real.

The Nobody films begin with a hope born of repentance and for atonement for past sins. Hutch and his wife both want to change their lives for the better, but devotees of the concept of “blessed are the meek” they are not. That beatitude can be seen as a fulfillment of the fifth commandment, a concept that Hutch unsuccessfully tries to embody by eschewing his life as a killer and taking on a mantle of humility. He is reminiscent of characters we’ve come to know and look up to in “High Noon,” “Shane” and David Cronenberg’s “A History of Violence”, men who choose to forego their violent past and lead a new life of peace and virtue.

Those movie heroes represented courage in the face of adversity, a quality we can admire and hope to find in ourselves when the time comes, a day and an hour that only God knows. They made a hard choice to select force over pacifism when faced with a danger. Each took a moral stand that played out in a physical world, but their fictional fight alluded to a real struggle, a spiritual one that Paul describes as a battle against powers and princes of darkness.

Hutch Mansell is not one of those heroes. He accepts defeat when he becomes what he fights. He may not join forces with the armies of evil, but he does a dance with them. A degrading and dangerous dance.

As mentioned in the opening quote from Deuteronomy, we find solace in the understanding that God knows who our enemies are. In case we forget, He names them repeatedly. And he pledges to help us defeat them: “I will fight with you.”

Sadly, for Hutch and for us, man’s law too often gets in the way of God’s law. Because we bowed to a tree’s false promise of the knowledge of good and evil, we lost the only knowledge that ever mattered: knowing that we are children of God. And friends of God. Now in exile, we find ourselves looking for a way to return to Him. The road back is a struggle. It’s a fight, but a good one, not a fight for revenge or for thrill or for expiation. Not the fight of Hutch Mansell whose first mistake was diminishing himself before God and before his fellow man. He is mistaken when he sees himself as a nobody.

Nobody is a nobody in God’s eyes.

• Violence: Extreme
• Profane language: Very Heavy, includes J*sus (3), Chr*st
• Vulgar/Crude language: Very Heavy— includes F-words, Motherf***er (8), B*tch, Son of a b*tch, A**, A**hole, Sh*t, P*ss
• Drugs/Alcohol: Moderately Heavy, includes drunkenness, smoking and drug
• Sex: Minor
• Wokeism: Minor
• Occult: None
• Nudity: None

Learn about DISCERNMENT, wisdom in making personal entertainment decisions

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