Movie review: 'Nobody 2' repeats successful formula
LOS ANGELES, Aug. 13 (UPI) -- Nobody 2, in theaters Friday, is a prototypical sequel that provides a slightly enhanced version of what defined the original film. Since 2021's Nobody was a fun action movie in the vein of John Wick, the sequel is also fun, but does not provide exponential world building like the later Wick movies.
Bob Odenkirk returns as Hutch Mansell, a special ops auditor who is back at work after exposing his violent government past in the first film. He's trying to work off the $30 million debt he now owes after destroying Russian mob money.
Hutch's task is keeping him away from his family, so he suggests a vacation to PlummerVille, a touristy water park from his childhood. On their first day at the park, local bullies attack Hutch's kids, Braden (Gage Munroe) and Sammy (Paisley Cadorath). When Hutch defends them, it lands the whole family in the corrupt PlummerVille sheriff's station.
Obviously, no one in the audience expects Hutch to rein in his combat prowess. Viewers came to see him overpower bullies and bad guys, so he does.
There is still a poignant theme to this simplified story though: Hutch and his wife, Becca (Connie Nielsen), truly attempt to de-escalate confrontations and let the bullies save face.
Yet, the world is full of bullies who will never get away with enough abuse to satisfy them. When an adult swats Sammy in the head, he's asking for Hutch to step in. What grown man hits a child in public?
The corrupt Sheriff Abel (Colin Hanks) and second generation businessman Wyatt Martin (Jon Ortiz) are determined to make an example of the Mansells. The pair work for Lendina (Sharon Stone), a crime boss who uses PlummerVille as a base of operations.
The police and local bullies in PlummerVille are smug because nobody has ever stood up to them before. Each of them are serving brutal masters so they lash out at their underlings, and Lendina probably fought her way to the top of that world too.
That plot is a little too complicated, but is worth it to introduce Stone as the main villain. The first Nobody had Hutch intervene with some thugs on a bus, incurring the wrath of the Russian mob he had to take out to keep his family safe.
Nobody 2 takes the scenic route, as it were, to essentially tell the same story: The wrong people mess with Hutch and he ultimately has to take them all out to ensure nobody attacks his family again, culminating in a showdown. The faceoff occurring at the theme park does make a fun climax.
Hutch is good when he's trying to avoid fights, using evasive maneuvers and non-lethal blows, but he's awesome when he lets loose.
Before every fight, Hutch checks his surroundings for ordinary objects to use as weapons, be it the emergency phone in an elevator or strapping a pipe to his hand. Odenkirk has built off his training for Nobody 2, though he's not quite where Keanu Reeves is after four Matrix movies and four and a half John Wick films.
Director Timo Tjahjanto, known for the incredible Indonesian martial arts movie The Night Comes for Us, gets as brutal as an R-rated Hollywood movie will allow, but there is still at least one onscreen dismemberment for fans of Night.
Stone did not train for action, so she acts hard instead. Vamping it up when she catches gamblers cheating in her casino or dancing while she waits for her army to assemble, this is the movie star Sharon Stone that Hollywood has neglected for too long.
Daniel Bernhardt, who trained Odenkirk for both movies and played a bus thug in the first film, returns as Lendita's No. 2. With a blonde buzzcut and mustache to indicate he's a different character, any excuse to let Bernhardt fight again is welcome.
It might be nice to let the family moments breathe a bit more. There's no way to dramatically justify including children in an action movie plot, however, so perhaps breezing through those scenes to show the Mansells supporting Hutch was smart.
At every step, Hutch is determined to take the high road as long as he can assure his family's safety. But then he'll see an endangered child, and he can't very well go back to his wife and kids having let another child be hurt or killed.
Giving those family members action moments is not the payoff the filmmakers, and perhaps even the actors, think they are. It's either celebrating the child endangerment, or with respect to Becca, paying feminist lip service when she's still serving a function of Hutch's story.
Nobody 2 works when it's delivering more of the same as the original film. Considering the trouble it runs into when its ambitions rise even slightly, it remains entirely satisfying to keep these simple. By the way, Hutch has not paid off the $30 million yet, so there's still work to be done in Nobody 3.
Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.
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