If the name Ilya Naishuller sounds familiar to you at all, then he was the director behind 2015’s Hardcore Henry that was briefly famous for being a film that seemed to be entirely shot from a first-person viewpoint. Then once it came out, everyone seemed to forget that it existed – don’t worry, I did too. Now six years later Naishuller has released Nobody, a film that has as little in common with his earlier work as possible.
The film begins with two detectives interviewing a badly beaten-up man named Hutch Mansell (Bob Odenkirk) who would rather feed a cat than answer the questions, so instead we get to see the events that unfolded to lead Hutch into this situation.
At first glance he seems to have an ordinary and mundane life – he gets the bus to work, tries and sometimes fails to take his trash out, exercises at a bus stop, does his very boring office job, has a coffee, comes home, makes dinner and then sleeps. His family life not that interesting either – he has a wife named Rebecca (Connie Nielsen), teenage son Blake (Gage Munroe) and daughter Sammy (Paisley Cadorath). They all look like a perfectly normal family and the only unusual thing about Mansell is that he talks to his half-brother Harry (played by RZA) through a radio. Everything begins to unravel when two burglars break into the Mansell home. Despite having a golf club at the ready, Mansell does nothing and the burglars get away with very few items of value. Word of what happened gets around, and on finding out that the intruders took a favoured bracelet that belonged to his daughter, he uses some unexpectedly brutal tactics to track them down and attack them – it turns out that he’s not as normal as the audience first assumed and is quite familiar with violence.
I won’t try to deny what the film’s main attraction is – Odenkirk in a role that isn’t in any way Breaking Bad related. I can guess that many critics will praise his performance but I thought that he was no more than competent in the role, nothing special at all. Unfortunately, this applies to most of the cast. Aleksei Serebryakov maybe be well respected for his acting skills but here just seems to be playing a certain type of gangster that has been done far too many times before. In a move I consider somewhat odd, Mansell’s dad is played by Christopher Lloyd, a decent actor who spends most of his time here in a chair at a retirement home. He does get some more screen time with some action thrown in near the end, but it’s already too late for him to salvage something worthy from a role that anyone could have filled, regardless of their experience. Out of all the people who could play a former handler convincingly, this film makes the inexplicable choice of Colin Salmon who does what he needs to and then exits the film after a few minutes, never to return.
A talking point for this film has been about who is behind the script. It’s Derek Kolstad whom you may know for his work on the John Wick franchise. Like the first entry in that series, he makes us wait a little while before the action kicks and, like Wick, when it does happen it’s often very brutal, visceral and even a little gruesome. It’s very obvious to me that Kolstad has a talent for writing action films, but here his characters are just boring and the film is only remotely interesting if there is some action to be enjoyed. What really surprised me about how boring this film is was during the scenes of dialogue. John Wick balanced action and talkative scenes very well, but here it just feels as if there has been a significant drop in quality. Also, I’m guessing what Hutch used to do for a living is meant to be a twist, but it’s an easy conclusion to come to if you give yourself the time.
The film looks fairly bland and David Buckley’s score may be described as generic and forgettable but the choice of other music is surprisingly varied. I’m not sure why we begin the film with Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood by Nina Simone but by the end we’ve had other songs like What A Wonderful World, The Impossible Dream and You’ll Never Walk Alone. There’s also a brief clip of Funky Music Sho Nuff Turns Me On by Edwin Starr. So the film may not have much going for it but it certainly has a soundtrack working in its favour.
Nobody failed to have the same impact on me that it seems to have had on many others. I found it tedious, unusual for a film less than two hours long, and the characters lack any interesting qualities that might prompt a second viewing. I did take the opportunity to look at what Kolstad has coming up next. It seems he’s working on adaptations of the video games Just Cause and Hitman, which I hope will come to fruition as he seems like the right person for the job. Judging by the success Nobody has already had, Odenkirk will continue to have a career outside the Breaking Bad universe and will go on to be anything but a ‘nobody’.
