Directed by: Ilya Naishuller
Starring: Bob Odenkirk, Alexey Serebryakov, Connie Nielsen, Christopher Lloyd, RZA
Rated R, 92 minutes
Spare a thought, just for a moment, for the action movie henchman. Picture him tumbling out of an armored van, running into the thick of the action to do his dangerous work. Think of him working out and practicing his gun handling, training for years to become an elite instrument of intimidation and violence. Sure, maybe henchmen are just the hired muscle for nefarious villains, lacking in ambition and scruples (and terrible with their aim, despite all that training), but underneath their all-black tactical gear and ski masks, they’re still people, aren’t they?
Then again, maybe they really are nobodies. In “Nobody,” an action flick that asks what it means to be somebody, the henchmen never get the benefit of the doubt. Mowed down in scores, sometimes in gunfights and sometimes through ridiculous booby traps à la “Home Alone,” the nameless goons of “Nobody” are never presumed to be anything more than disposable dead weight.
The movie’s protagonist, Hutch Mansell (Bob Odenkirk, “Better Call Saul”), a hard-working American dad with a wife and two kids and a nice house at the end of a cul-de-sac, struggles with a similar quandary, wondering if he too is dead weight. He sleepwalks through a repetitive routine of coffee, bus stops, and an accounting job; he never gets the trash out to the curb in time for the garbage truck; he and his wife, Becca (Connie Nielsen, “Gladiator”), sleep with a wall of pillows between them. “I miss you,” he says to her one night. “Remember who we used to be? I do.”
The sentiment is more loaded than it sounds, though. In a former life, Hutch was a ruthless military agent, an “auditor” sent to punish enemies who refused to cooperate (“The last guy any organization wants to see at their door,” he explains to a dying henchman). He’s long since left that life behind, but a chance break-in reawakens the beast in Hutch, lifting him out of his midlife crisis even as it plunges him into a series of bloody encounters.
The movie packs a lot into its brief runtime—Russian mobsters, stacks of cash, odd subplots involving Hutch’s father (Christopher Lloyd, “Back to the Future”) and brother (RZA, “American Gangster”)—but the focus, mainly, is on the fighting. Director Ilya Naishuller (“Hardcore Henry”) and writer Derek Kolstad (“John Wick”) deliver such an overabundance of action sequences and inventive methods for maiming henchmen that it would be overkill if it weren’t also tinged with gallows humor. Bob Odenkirk is perfectly cast in a role that demands both brutality and dry wit, his meekness a bewildering foil to the movie’s unbridled violence. A henchman dies while listening to him speak about his past; he brushes off the insult (and some broken glass) and walks away, like it’s happened before.
His quest to feel more like a somebody—more like a man, more like the breadwinner, more like the protector of his family—is mostly cast aside while he cuts down bands of bad guys, but what little we do see of Hutch’s feelings of inadequacy is thought-provoking. After the initial break-in that sets off the plot, Hutch feels impotent for having let the crooks go, and the people around him don’t have much sympathy (“If that was my family,” a cop muses, chuckling at the thought of what he might have done in Hutch’s shoes). But even if pacifism leaves Hutch unsatisfied, a trail of bodies left in his wake seems a dubious cure. The movie challenges our instinctive thirst for blood even as it depicts, in almost giddy detail, the spilling of it, the violence reaching such a fever pitch that you start to wonder if the whole plot might be taking place in Hutch’s head.
It’s not, but it might as well be—it’s all fiction, anyway. (No henchmen were harmed in the making of this film.) On the surface, “Nobody” is just 90 minutes of well-choreographed fight scenes, but its troubling antihero, this man who regains his personhood only through the killing of others, makes the movie uniquely perplexing. It asks us plainly how much violence is justifiable, and to what end. But “Nobody” also makes it easy to ignore that question entirely and just enjoy the spectacle of the bloodsport. If nobody really gets hurt, then what’s the harm?
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 4/30/21.