NOBODY: Maybe It’s Time To Let The Old Ways Die

There’s an undeniable purity to Nobody. It’s bloody, bruised, and battered, but that’s the makeup of pure action. Flying punches and lovingly wielded guns hung on a framework plot that’s mostly there to get us from set piece to set piece, this is a specific kind of film that’s just getting back in vogue thanks to the success of the John Wick franchise.

And Nobody relishes the return, offers up what people want from these films with verve and humor, and never stops to wonder if it should. I know, I know, turning your mind off is sort of the point of these stylishly slick pieces of entertainment, and if you can actually do that I’m sure you’ll enjoy this shoot ‘em up. But even a slight bit of attention reveals a well-worn, retrograde sensibility that gives its glorification a sickly hue, one that, once you notice it, can’t be ignored.

Having Your Cake

Comparisons to John Wick abound not only because of its genre overlaps but because of their shared writer. Derek Kolstad has been focused on that well-tailored creation of his for years now, and Nobody marks his first unrelated feature since the franchise took off. His sensibilities honed, he works through the winning elements with ease. The film’s central man, Bob Odenkirk’s Hutch, is too quiet to be taken at face value, and quickly hints are dropped that the mild-mannered family man is connected to a mysterious underworld. The trigger to get him back in is simple, the bad guys are explicitly identified, and the plot chugs along with nary a snag. Kolstad has mastered this kind of film and it shows in its smoothness, its ability to get right to the good stuff, and to spread it out evenly, even if it inevitably lacks the depth of his now 3 film franchise.

Director Ilya Naishuller is in on the game as well, making use of some nifty montages to not only steamroll through the setup but to add in some well-measured bits of humor. This is on the funnier side of the genre, taking a guy, not at the top of his game but one that would’ve lost a step by now even if he never got out and mining his slip-ups for laughs. Odenkirk is perfectly cast in this regard, his wiley expressions at times menacing and laughable, getting across as a man not quite at home in any of the worlds he’s navigating.

All of this makes Nobody a pleasure to skim through, the vicarious thrill of ambling into exaggerated situations and dominating our enemies being a fantasy we all indulge in from time to time, but an innocent one it is not.

And Choking on the Poison

Odenkirk presents another link that is near inescapable as you take in Nobody. The Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul star has been in innumerable projects, but most connect him to that pillar of TV’s Golden Age and its spinoff, particularly that wave of prestige dramas about the plight of middle-aged white men.

The rough plot applied to Nobody is of very much the same ilk: a man with the trappings of a good life finds himself unfulfilled, his world has changed in ways that fill him with ennui over a vague promise that has been lost. Cue the tiny violins (and in this case, raining bullets).

What follows in Nobody is a reassertion of masculinity, and I’m not stretching for this reading. The movie continuously leans on very gendered, old-school displays of dominance and power, even while tricking itself into thinking it’s added progressive spins. 

The underworld bad guy Hutch faces off against is introduced as a snappily dressed song and dance man, and this is played as an anachronism to be immediately questioned. But come on, that’s only an anachronism if you have the most narrow idea of gender norms (Glee took care of that silliness in its first season). This movie, though, feels the need to correct any confusion with a barbaric display of violence, because its idea of strength is quite literal. Add in the repeated use of young women in danger and girls who have been wronged as Hutch’s excuse to unleash his dormant butt-kicking abilities and its textbook relegation of black men and you have an eye-rollingly tiresome message about how frustrated white men can get themselves out of a rut and take control of their life with brutish behavior.

And oh yeah, this movie is total gun porn. There’s some hand-to-hand combat, but it’s mostly in the early rounds, with the escalation of violence pretty directly linked to the type and amount of guns used. This is supposed to be cool, obviously, but the action lacks the crisp choreography of its recent counterparts, although one shot following a gun itself is nifty.

The ethics of mindless carnage as entertainment is its own deep rabbit hole, one that’s hard to argue definitively as good, bad, or benign, but that’s not all that’s going on here. Nobody asks you to take the old standard of masculine panic and resolve it with explosions of bone-crushing, flesh-shredding violence, and that messaging has proven definitively gross and harmful.

I mean, really, does anyone feel good about an insecure white man finding himself by wielding a lot of guns anymore? I sure as hell don’t.

Conclusion: Nobody

A sturdy but familiar entry in the mindless shoot ‘em up genre, Nobody hews so close to standards that it brings the whole genre into question. I understand anyone who’s able to put aside these pesky readings in order to have fun with this, but I would implore you to remember that nothing is truly mindless, that even entertainment that plays to our base instincts should be questioned, because you might be feeding some brain stem thinking that should never be allowed out of our own heads.

What did you think of Nobody? Were you able to relish its action or did you have nagging issues? Let us know in the comments!

Nobody will be released in theaters in the US on March 26, 2021.

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