2025 | rated R | starring Bob Odenkirk, Connie Nielsen, John Ortiz, RZA, Sharon Stone, Colin Hanks, Colin Salmon, Christopher Lloyd | directed by Timo Tijahjanto | 1 hr 29 mins | 2 out of 5 stars |
[Spoilers, like it matters]
Family man with a certain set of skill, Hutch Mansell (Bob Odenkirk) has been spending too many nights away from his wife (Connie Neilsen) and kids committing assassinations, so he whisks them off to an underwhelming waterpark in Plummerville, CA for some bonding time only to run into some local police who want him out before he stumbles on their illegal mob operation.
The Taken-inspired movies about retired agents/contract killers who get drawn back into violence to protect their family were tired when the first Nobody came out in 2021, however putting Bob Odenkirk in that role was a move inspired enough to make it worth a watch (along with a great little bus fight set piece worth the price of admission). For a premise that barely coasted by the first time, the studio rolls the dice on a sequel and doubles down on everything that didn’t work about the first movie. Again, I was suckered back into this with the involvement of Timo Tajahjanto, curious to see what the director of the bombastic and brutal The Night Comes for Us and The Shadow Strays would contribute to this distinctly Hollywood franchise.
The answer, as it turns out, is not a lot as Nobody 2 is positively built out of one tired trope after another. This is a house where the foundation, the wall, the plumbing, the electricity, everything is pulled not directly from another person’s work but the hazy, nebulous cloud of toolbox writing cliches that floats around Hollywood that everyone pulls from.
With the surprise of Hatch’s skills revealed and the world he lives and works explained (somewhat), the movie strips all that away and goes for a National Lampoon’s Vacation via A Good Day to Die Hard story where Hatch spends much of the film struggling to keep his vacation upright and his family oblivious while he contents with Russian mobsters operating out of this tiny theme part. One of the biggest problems with this movie is the waterpark, the hotel and the town of Plummerville itself – it’s all such a depressingly empty wasteland of a setting. It becomes clear when the movie tries to replicate the bus fight on a duck-boat-that-isn’t-a duck-boat with a group of Ozark-level thugs and oblivious passengers that nothing here is hitting as well as it did the first time around.
The villains are the kind of frustratingly terrible group of smalltown bullies that show up in movies like this. These villains are designed to get under your skin in the laziest possible ways. They’re dumb, all-talk, territorial, portray bravado or no reason at all and would be easily beaten if the movie would allow if, but the story wants us to think that Hutch is doing a bad job of controlling his temper when he delivers a beating to a stranger who straight-up slaps his young daughter in the head. From there we move up to Colin Hanks as the crooked Sherif, which works about as well as you’d imagine, the waterpark owner (John Ortiz) and then a massive over-correction with the cartoonishly evil mafia boss over all of it, Lendina (Sharon Stone). Lendina is so evil she kills a guy for cheating in her casino, then kills all those he was working with, then kills all the innocent people in the room just for being there. I mean, come on.
We provoke Lendina, round up the allies and bobby trap the water park into a kill factory for the film’s big finish. It’s in the finale few minutes when Nobody 2 whips out its most egregious of modern tropes. It’s the old Penny Gadget trope, the Thor: Love and Thunder formula, The one where our hero can’t finish off the bad guy themselves, so the woman in their lives has to step in and do it despite that she’s never shown any capability like this in two movies, and despite spending the entirety of this movie nagging Hutch for fighting back. Connie Nielsen’s Becca simply becomes a stone-cold killer with an expert shot with one line of throwaway dialog.
To understand what the hell is happening here, it’s worth travelling back in time to the late 90s and Joel Schumacher’s Batman and Robin. Yep. In that movie Alicia Silverstone shows up as Batgirl and has almost nothing to do or the duration until she appears again in the finale to take out Uma Thurman’s Poison Ivy. Usually movies are better at padding over this stuff but Batman and Robin is such a clunky mess that it gives away the game. The only reason Batgirl is in that movie is so that she can take out Poison Ivy instead of Batman, because as much as women more and more share equal time as villains, that image comes in conflict with an audience that has a short leash to see a man beat up a woman, even if that man is Batman and that woman is an evil monster who murders people and plots world domination. When Sharon Stone was cast as the villain in this movie it became inappropriate for our hero of the last two films to stop her and Nobody 2 was forced by whatever hand to open this trap door and find a woman to take out our female heroine. Which is why we have this wedged-in, completely nonsensical and out of character ending.
And on top of it, the movie has the sheer gall to pretend this is something new and fresh. It’s wrap around twist when Becca is revealed as Hutch’s partner (I guess) is executed with such a knowing aren’t-we-clever hang-a-lampshade-on-it smirk that Nobody 2 went from simply boring to obnoxious.