The review was first published on MadAboutMoviez: Nobody review
I was channel surfing on a boring day, not sure what I wanted to watch, my eyes fell on “Nobody”. There was Bob Odenkirk, probably lying on the ground, and many fists landing on his contorted face. Images of Saul Goodman from “Better Call Saul” & “Breaking Bad”, who usually got roughed up or picked up by gang members, started popping out of my memory. I had never seen Bob in a movie before, so I felt, this was as good a time as any, to watch a full fledged movie of Bob Odenkirk.
Not knowing what to expect, I bravely selected the movie and let it play. Interestingly, within first 10 mins they show us a glimpse of Hutch’s routine life, of waking up, going on a jog, preparing breakfast, missing the garbage truck, getting to work, punching the hours, returning etc. Day in and day out, that was his mundane tale. Until one evening, an armed couple enter their home to rob them blind. Hutch’s teenage son, Blake, manages to tackle one of them, and signals his father to take down the other member. But Hutch seems reluctant, and lets them go. Somewhere, I felt vindicated that this was a movie of a repressed soul who usually lets things go, takes it on his chin and moves on.
After the incident, Blake is of course disappointed and even other family members, his wife Becca and daughter Abby, think of him as a coward. The assailants take away petty cash and some bibelot, but very soon they discover that Abby’s kitty bracelet has gone missing. That’s when things start moving really fast. You realize, Hutch is not who he claims to be, a docile family man who cannot protect his family.
Hutch visits his dad, picks up the oldman’s FBI badge to threaten his way through and picks up a gun to bolster himself. And in this sudden daredevilry, we get to know of his background, in bits and pieces. The bracelet retrieval job goes awry and in the process he ends up antagonizing Russian war lords. And a whole gamut of them are now behind him. This tough side of Hutch, really comes as a surprise.
The raw fist fight with limited space in a moving bus, is very well shot. Hutch takes on the goons, in what is all nerve and sinew with some adrenaline rush. Also, the manner in which the face-off happens with the drug lord, is also beautifully captured in a fine dine sequence. The action that ensues, were just fabulous. That’s when, out of curiosity I googled to check, and found that Derek Kolstad, the creator of John Wick series, was the writer of the movie. No wonder, the fights were so well choregraphed. Not just the fight, but the entire prep for the fight, family protection, cleanup, ammunition stockpile, booby traps and high decibel gun shots, were brilliantly done.
But the masterstroke was in casting Bob Odenkirk as Hutch. The way he presented the passive father and dutiful worker, and then transformed to a person with pent up frustration and channelizing his anger to mow down an army of gangsters, was stupendous. The film elevates itself from a family drama to a full blown action extravaganza, at the hands of some deft direction by Ilya Naishuller. He begins the movie with a slow poise and morning dust, and then moves into brisk pace and finally ends on a high voltage adrenalin filled with smoke and gun powder.
I would surely like to see Hutch “Nobody” Mansell becomes a series, because it surely deserves a sequel at par with John Wick. Watch this movie, while you are still waiting for John Wick 4
crazyrals 