Why Nobody Is A Smash Hit Despite The Nasty Reviews

Nobody

Starring  Bob Odenkirk, Connie Nielsen, Aleksei Serebryakov, RZA, Michael Ironside, Colin Salmon

Directed  by Ilya Naishuller

Rating: ** ½

Most  reviewers have    come down  on  this actioner with a ton  of bricks condemning its ostensibly gratuitous violence  in  almost abusive tones. So ask them if they care ? They are  too busy laughing all the way  to the bank . Nobody is  a top grosser at movie theatres  in spite of  the pandemic.

Something about this  furious  fable  of a Common Man rising to take on the Russian mafia has clicked  with audiences. It isn’t hard to understand  why.Sitting locked away at home you do wish you could take control of  the  chaos , fix the scummy  situation.

 That’s what Hutch(played with kinetic spontaneity  by  Bob Odenkirk) does.He  opens up that festering wound  inside us, cleans  up the  mess, and stitches  it up again  nice and antiseptic.  I must confess I  quite  liked  the  film’s seething  first-half when Hutch  , alienated from his  family who don’t think much  of him(wasn’t that true of even Albert Einstein?)  goes through  his daily routine  of  taking the garbage out(wait till you saw  the garbage  that he takes  out at  the end  of  the film), punching in to work, commuting back to his disadainful family etc.

 The  director hammers  in  the monotony to  a  hysterical proportion . We  know  Hutch will erupt,  and he  does.Half an hour  into this pulverized  picture show there is  a violent  outburst in a bus, the kind that Charles Bronson fans  would recognize from Death  Wish or nearer in time Keanu Reeves fans in  John Wick. 

But I believe  Odenkirk has  done something  here that  his predecessors  would admire him for. The  fight in the  bus is not just  a fight to save  a girl from being  attacked by a bunch of rowdies. It is  Hutch’s payback time  an enough-is-enough signal, unleashing a feast of fury that sends  tingle up the  audience’s  supine over-rested spine.

The  rest  of  the fights that follow just don’t match  up to the sheer velocity and  impact  of  the fight  in the  bus. The Russian mafia chipping in with a torrent of violence left me  cold. There is a  shootout in  Hutch’s home where he  locks  his family into the basement and  takes care  of the  mess, with bodies lying on sofas tables and every empty  space, which seems  too cold and calculated to  appear as a spontenous gesture of violence.

 More  liberating in its  impact is the  role of Hutch’s  father a retired  FBI agent,played  by veteran  Christopher  Lloyd, whose  mob-hatred  gets re-ignited when his son is under attack. The  fury  that is  plastered across every  frame  is  palpable. But that sense  of justice which the  common man is expected to feel after he erupts,  is missing.  You see, we  were deceived.Hutch is  not  a  common man. He is a hellraiser . He deserved a  better screenplay.