2 days ago
A mindlessly thuggish action sequel... and what are they doing with Sharon Stone?
In 2021's Nobody, a former government assassin played by Bob (Better Call Saul) Odenkirk was triggered into dusting off his old combat skills. In so doing, he notched up a body count higher than his age, which was already pretty close to pipe-and-slippers time. In the considerably weaker Nobody 2, Odenkirk's Hutch just wants some peace and quiet but, inevitably, everything descends into carnage.
He books a holiday with his family to a run-down amusement park where he used to cavort as a teenager. Summery nostalgia is soon replaced by bone-crunching rage, when locals prove inhospitable, the police (headed by Colin Hanks's ratty sheriff) despicably corrupt, and the whole locale a playpen for a take-no-prisoners crime boss named Lendina (Sharon Stone).
The appeal of the film is basic and, frankly, monotonous. In scene after scene, Hutch bends over backwards to be polite. Some sort of affront is caused – such as an arcade owner clipping Hutch's teenage daughter behind the ear. He tries, manfully, to turn the other cheek. But this aggression will never stand. He blasts back in, sends every assailant flying, and hardly ends a sequence without causing something to explode.
This is the Hollywood debut of Indonesian action director Timo Tjahjanto, who knows his way around a wince-inducing fight sequence, but seemingly not much else. Connie Nielsen is once again wasted as Hutch's wife, presumably because it would be too implicitly emasculating, even in this cartoon setup, to have her partake in the carnage. Eight-six-year-old Christopher Lloyd, as Hutch's dad, attends the holiday, only to vanish for about an hour with no one batting an eyelid.
Odenkirk's rueful magnetism lifted the first film quite a bit, but this one is a heavier, more thuggish burden: he can only do so much. It's sad, too, that Stone sketches us such a superficial villain. She has steely swept-back hair and carries around a French bulldog, but these are lazy shortcuts to characterisation. A lot of her dialogue is insupportably dire. It's not the choice turn we're craving.
Nobody 2 is at least watchable until the effects-stuffed finale, which looks depressingly sloppy – like the mangiest stuff by Kingsman's Matthew Vaughn or Wanted's Timur Bekmambetov.
The whole film gets worse as you step away. The moral universe in which Hutch reprimands his teenage son for getting into brawls, only to hospitalise dozens of goons himself with snarling relish, is winkingly hypocritical – something acknowledged as a joke, but vapidly shrugged off before the next rampage. You get the impression nobody much cares.
In cinemas now
