Nobody, from 2021, was notable for Bob Odenkirk’s first starring role in a movie, after a few decades kicking around Hollywood as a sketch writer, performer, and eventually a TV star. It’s not common for an actor to play an action hero for the first time at 58, but Odenkirk did. That film had a premise—a mild-mannered family man turns out to have a secret past as a spy/assassin, which catches up with him—that’s the most stale plot imaginable. But Nobody punched above its weight, thanks to some outstanding action, creative set pieces, and a decent sense of humor. Due in part to good will for Odenkirk, the film did well, despite coming out at a time, March of 2021, when a lot of people were just getting back to theaters during the pandemic.
Now there’s a sequel, Nobody 2. Director Ilya Naishuller isn’t back—he recently directed Heads of State, another film that overcame what sounded like a stupid set-up—and he’s been replaced by Indonesian director Timothy Tjahjanto. The premise of these movies is essentially A History of Violence, except it’s a comedy, and questions of crime and morality are given the tiniest amount of lip service, just before it’s time for more villainous henchmen to die in comical ways.
The new film follows the plot of the original nearly beat for beat, including the same framing device and another third-act sequence that pays homage to Home Alone and its booby traps. And just like Speed and Speed 2, while the first film had a memorable fight scene on a bus, the sequel moves it to a boat. The set-up is creative, and there are laughs, but the action is much choppier and a huge step down from the first film, when the fight scenes were more on the level of John Wick and Atomic Blonde.
The premise is that Hutch (Odenkirk) has resumed his career as a professional killer, which has led his wife (Connie Nielsen) to resent him for never being around (his son and daughter, meanwhile, are barely characters at all). He decides to take the family on vacation, to the place he loved as a kid: a kitschy resort town and theme park in the Midwest that’s obviously modeled on the Wisconsin Dells. But he soon runs afoul of a different group of villains, and before long, bad guys are getting walloped by whack-a-mole mallets, and the waterslides are running red with blood.
Odenkirk, a native of the Chicago suburbs, likely knows the Dells well, though he said in a recent interview that the Dells area has gotten fancier over time, so the film was shot in Winnipeg instead. The pseudo-Dells is a front for a massive criminal underworld, with corrupt cops everywhere, John Ortiz serving as an unlikely Boss Hogg figure and Colin Hanks as his even less likely Roscoe P. Coltrane. The Big Bad, though, is Sharon Stone, having a lot of fun as a snarling, occasionally dancing criminal boss. Along for the ride is Hutch’s dad (86-year-old Christopher Lloyd), who’s just as keen to tote guns as his son is.
It’s silly and occasionally enjoyable. However, the contrast with Cronenberg’s A History of Violence is even starker than in the first Nobody. You could say the same thing about Breaking Bad, on which Odenkirk co-starred, which was also about a nondescript dad suddenly becoming skilled at crime and killing. In the Cronenberg film, as in this one, the father is revealed as secretly good at violence, his son follows that example, and the film treats that as somewhat tragic. The same thing happens in Nobody 2, except the film just shrugs it off. There are plot holes, too. After the film establishes that Hutch owes a massive debt because he burned a pile of the mob’s money, the sequel quickly puts him in a position to… burn a pile of money again, in a plot that has no resolution or consequence at all. And one character suffers a finger dismemberment, but doesn’t seem bothered by it.