Suburban dad Hutch Mansell, a former lethal assassin, is pulled back into his violent past after thwarting a home invasion, setting off a chain of events that unravels secrets about his wife Becca’s past and his own.
Seeing Bob Odenkirk star in his own John Wick-like action movie delighted me in 2021. After being a fan of his for years, starting with HBO’s sketch comedy “Mr. Show with Bob and David,” then the seminal crime masterpiece “Breaking Bad” and its far-superior spin-off, “Better Call Saul,” Odenkirk was the last person I would expect to see taking down droves of bad guys. But now the 62-year-old actor is right up there with Keanu Reeves and Ana de Armas.
With a refreshing series opener out of the way, the fish-out-of-water angle of this franchise is gone, and Odenkirk is the bona fide action hero, Hutch Mansell. He still owes a massive debt after his actions in the original film (namely, burning $30 million of a Russian mobster’s cash), leaving him with no choice but to continue his life as an assassin to pay his debtors.
This continues to cause a strain on his marriage to Becca (Connie Nielsen), and his role as father to Sammy (Paisley Cadorath) and Brady (Gage Munroe), his teenage son, whose level of aggression starts to mirror his father’s. To give everyone in the family a break in the last days of summer, Hutch decides to take them on a family vacation to Plummerville, a Wally World-like amusement park he visited as a boy: his father, David, tags along, played by the returning Christopher Lloyd.
“Nobody 2” is like seeing John Wick meets National Lampoon’s Vacation.
There are plenty of great gags as this sequel veers more towards action-comedy than gritty crime drama. You can see Leitch’s print all over the fight sequences. Following an altercation between Brady and a young resident of Plummerville, the park proves to be more than meets the eye—a front for organized crime headed by park owner Wyatt Martin (John Ortiz) and his corrupt sheriff enforcer, Abel (played by Colin Hanks).
They all answer to Lendina (Sharon Stone), the mastermind who feels like an unfinished draft of a character straight out of the Wick-verse. Her introduction is where the story starts to run out of steam. I found her character a little too obnoxious. It would have felt more well-rounded if the conflict had stayed entirely within the little vacation town. Colin Hanks’ character is also entertaining as a villain, but in the end, he’s tragically wasted.
RZA returns as Hutch’s adopted younger brother, Harry, who’s spent a little time in Japan between entries and now wields a katana and sees himself as a samurai assassin. I’m sensing the people who made this movie may be “Assassin’s Creed” fans, as that was the plot of the most recent game.
This would be a perfect sequel if it held onto the family man aspect and didn’t sink so far into copying the Wick movies. The father-son element plays such a central role in the first two acts but fades away entirely by the end. The final act was incredibly entertaining, with booby traps set around the amusement park for Lendina’s incoming henchmen like a psychotic “Home Alone” gag.
I felt the final moments were a little too Deadpool-inspired. Hutch’s wife pulls him out of the lake while Celine Dion’s ‘Power of Love’ plays. I’m sure that was David Leitch’s idea, and not director Timo Tjahjanto’s.
In Theaters Friday, August 15th
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