'NOBODY', which I saw at my local multiplex earlier this week, is an MA15+ Rated American action thriller Directed by the Russian musician and filmmaker Ilya Naishuller whose only previous feature film was 2015's
'Hardcore Henry' for which he also Produced, Wrote, acted in, composed the music for and also lensed. Released in the US on 26th March, the film has so far grossed US$22M off the back of its US$16M production budget and has generated favourable Reviews. Apparently in March of this year Naishuller discussed the potential of a crossover film featuring Nobody and the
'John Wick' franchise, expressing interest in the possibility based on the films' similar tones. It should be noted that David Leitch Co-Directed the first
'John Wick' film with Chad Stahelski and also Produces here, and Derek Kolstad who wrote this film and Executive Produces, also wrote the first three
'John Wick' films too.
And so, here Hutch Mansell (Bob Odenkirk) is a seemingly ordinary man - he has two children with his wife Becca (Connie Nielsen), has an unremarkable job as an office worker mulling over the books every day at his father-in-law Eddie Williams (Michael Ironside) metal fabrication business, and generally keeps to himself. The tedium of his life is slowly grinding him down, he and his wife have not been intimate in years, his teenage son Blake (Gage Munroe) has no respect for him as a father, and only his younger daughter, Sammy (Paisley Cadorath) shows him any affection.
One night while Hutch can't sleep he goes downstairs and disturbs a pair of black clad burglars who have broken into his house, hold him at gunpoint and demand cash. Hutch gives them his wrist watch, but when the now identified man and woman try to leave, Blake tackles the man to the ground. Hutch is about to attack the girl with a golf club, but at the last second stops himself from doing so and lets the pair get away. Blake cops a black eye in the process. The incident causes more of a rift between Blake and his father, and everyone in Hutch's life, from his neighbour to his brother-in-law at work, asks him why he did not try to stop the burglars. Hutch contacts his supposedly deceased half-brother Harry (RZA) on a hidden radio in his office and explains that he saw no reason to intervene as the burglars were using an unloaded gun anyway.
When he comes home later that day, Sammy asks her father for help finding her kitty cat bracelet, which Hutch believes the thieves took. Without saying a word, he goes to see his elderly father David (Christopher Lloyd) who lives in a aged care home, and borrows his old FBI badge and gun to track down the burglars by a distinctive tattoo on the girls wrist which Hutch observed during the night of the burglary. After visiting three tattoo parlours he is eventually led to their apartment and threatens them, but when he realises they robbed him to get money to pay for their sick baby's medical treatment, he leaves in shame and beats the crap out of a brick wall instead.
The bus he takes home is stopped by a gang of drunken Russian thugs, who crash their vehicle by the side of the bus, and decide to hitch a ride. They start by antagonising the other few passengers on board who all abruptly leave except for a young girl and Hutch. Hutch escorts the bus driver out of the vehicle taking her mobile phone and placing it on the dash board, before closing the door behind him. Standing at the entry to the bus the five Russians thugs all turn to look at Hutch as he says 'I'm going to fuck you up', at which point the antagonists all begin to laugh. Hutch takes out his frustration by savagely beating up all of them, leaving them all severely bloodied and broken, but not before sustaining a knife wound to his side and also copping a beating, leaving him battered and bruised.
Harry then sends his brother to see a man known as 'The Barber' (Colin Salmon), who provides Hutch with intelligence about one of his victims, Terry (Aleksandr Pal) the younger brother of Yulian Kuznetsov (Aleksei Serebryakov), a notorious Russian mob boss and enforcer. Although Yulian despises his brother, he feels obligated to avenge him and sends a crew led by his right-hand man Pavel (Araya Mengesha) to attack Hutch at home after deducing his identity via his misplaced Metro card. Hutch hides his family in their secure basement and kills most of the attackers before Pavel subdues him with a taser and puts him in the boot of a car to take him to Yulian. Coming round handcuffed, Hutch dislocates his thumb to be able to slip his hand through the handcuffs. He finds a fire extinguisher in the boot behind the rear seat, and uses it to blindside his abductors, causing the car to crash headlong into a pole and to flip on to its roof landing upside down, killing Pavel and the two others in the front seats.
He returns home to find his family still hidden in the basement. He sends Becca and the children away to a safe location. With four of the antagonists still alive (albeit barely) Hutch has them lined up on the sofa in his basement while he recounts his story, before they all die of their injuries. Hutch explains that he is a former 'auditor', an assassin employed by intelligence agencies to kill people who were considered untouchable, too hard to arrest, or living outside of the law. He was very good at his work and performed it diligently until one day, he let a man he was supposed to kill for stealing U.S. government funds go free. Returning a year later, much to his surprise Hutch found the man had built a new life and family for himself and was living the straight and narrow. Seeing this and wanting a life similar to his, Hutch decided to retire against the wishes of his superiors, and since then has done everything possible to downplay any recollection of his former life. Until now!
With the four all dead, he finds his daughters missing kitty cat bracelet under the sofa before leaving the basement saying that it will burn at 3000° where human bones burn away to nothing at 1500°, so destroying all the evidence. He torches the room and burns his house down to destroy any indication of the carnage that went down therein.
After giving Eddie a stash of gold bars to buy his company from him which is accepted on the spot, Hutch closes down the business until further notice and sets about rigging up numerous booby traps inside. Hutch then goes to Yulian's extensive private art collection and the stash of cash money he was protecting for the mob and torches it all, killing all of the Russian's goons in the process. He leaves with an original Van Gogh tucked under this arm - the only remnant of Yulian's priceless art collection.
Hutch then goes to Yulian's private club and sits down and eats a steak while the Russian is singing and dancing on stage. When Yulian is done he siddles up to Hutch with all of his henchmen in tow. Hutch though is not phased by this and under a napkin reveals a Claymore mine pointed directly at the Russian mob boss, attached to a hair trigger attached to his thumb. Hutch has a civil conversation with Yulian after all the goons have been ordered from the room, and tells him that he can either choose to come after him or he can take what he has left and flee with his nice little nest egg and open up a bar somewhere in the Caribbean having changed his appearance somewhat.
Yulian needless to say chooses the former option and angrily calls up every man on his payroll and pursues Hutch to the factory, where David and Harry show up to help Hutch take down the gangsters using a variety of weapons and deadly traps that Hutch had set up previously. They kill all of the gunmen with the exception of Yulian, who shoots and wounds Harry in the shoulder. Hutch charges him with a Claymore mine attached to a bulletproof shield and detonates it, killing Yulian, whilst affording Hutch a degree of protection.
He lets his father and brother escape, and is arrested by the Police. Sitting in the interview room being questioned by a male and female officer, Hutch produces a kitten from under his jacket and a can of tunafish which he opens so that the cat can eat. He is asked by the officers who he is, at which Hutch replies 'I'm nobody'. At this point the officers mobile phones ring simultaneously. After they both hang up they have a look of disbelief on their faces and Hutch is quickly released with no charges filed.
Fast forward three months, while checking out a new house to buy with Becca, Hutch receives a call via the Real Estate Agents mobile phone suggesting that his services are still required. In a mid-credits sequence, Harry and David are shown driving to an unspecified location along an ocean highway in a mobile home filled with guns.
At a brisk 92 minutes run time,
'Nobody' does not leave you wanting. Make no mistake, there are plenty of touchstones here straight out of the
'John Wick' playbook, but there's nothing wrong with that given that in Bob Odenkirk we have a new action hero who kicks, punches, gouges, stabs, shoots and blows up a small army of Russian bad guys using a very particular set of previously dormant skills - and what's not to like about this kind of stylised violence. Odenkirk is perfectly cast as the very ordinary man at the outset thrust into extra-ordinary circumstances by the end and he plays it with all the downbeat charisma and relateability that plays to the actors strengths. And as for the now 82 years old Christopher Lloyd, he just looks like he was having so much fun as the gun totting octogenarian on a day out from his aged care facility reliving past times and the good ol' days. This is fast paced, brutal, emotionally charged and at times laugh out loud funny too that doesn't reinvent the genre but provides 92 minutes of pure escapism , and adrenalin fuelled entertainment that for lovers of this fare will tick all the right boxes.
'Nobody' warrants four claps of the Odeon Online clapperboard from a possible five claps.
