The beauty of the original action-comedy Nobody was how it scratched a collective itch during the pandemic. Languishing in our locked-down abodes in 2021 and streaming it on TV, we experienced a coronavirus catharsis watching Bob Odenkirk play an unleashed everyman lashing out at myriad social ills in imaginatively violent ways.

 

Nobody is a one-joke story, but it’s a good joke: Odenkirk’s Hutch Mansell is a meek family man with a secret past as a badass government assassin. His love for mayhem is reignited after a humiliating home invasion and threats to his family from a Russian mobster.

 

Nobody 2, the inevitable follow-up, shows there’s one challenge Hutch can’t quite handle: the immutable movie law that sequels must be bigger than what came before — and, man, is it ever. Turns out we can get too much of Hutch, although he and his kin still make for entertaining company.

 

Hutch always seems a bit sheepish about what he does (“Guys, I don’t want to fight you”), even while gleefully smashing the skulls of seriously bad dudes. He’s akin to the stoic Keanu Reeves in John Wick, although comparisons to both films apply.

 

Nobody 2 opens with Hutch going on his assigned assassinations, implausibly working off a massive debt to the same Russian mob he fought in the first film, despite the toll his constant absences are taking on his long-suffering family: wife Becca (Connie Nielsen), son Brady (Gage Munroe) and daughter Sammy (Paisley Cadorath).

Can this marriage and family survive?

 

The proposed solution is a getaway week to Wild Bill’s Majestic Midway and Waterpark, the tacky playground Hutch fondly remembers from his childhood. He went there on the one and only vacation he took with his charismatic rascal dad, David (Christopher Lloyd), and his inscrutable brother, Harry (RZA).

 

With David tagging along (and packing heat), Hutch and the gang load up the family chariot and head to the Nowheresville tourist burgh of Plummerville where a highway sign announces “Plummerville Is Summerville!”

They’ve barely arrived at their ’50s-designed playground when an entitled local (whose dad runs the place) bullies Brady and Sammy in the games arcade, prompting a response from Brady and an over-the-top reaction from Hutch.

 

Pushing and shoving between the kids turns into a near-lethal brawl between the adults, started by an out-of-control Hutch (the trailer reveals all), as he uses one guy’s face to play whack-a-mole and another for pinball.

At this point it’s fair to wonder about the motives not just of Hutch, but of the entire film, which action specialist Timo Tjahjanto (The Night Comes for Us, The Shadow Strays ) directs with the subtlety of a 10-car highway pileup.

 

Hutch lectures Brady about not overreacting to provocations even as he himself insanely overreacts to aggressors. These include the sleazy theme-park operator (John Ortiz), the town’s smug sheriff (Colin Hanks) and local crime boss Lendina (Sharon Stone), the most cartoonish villain this side of the Marvel or 007 franchises.

 

The waterpark is just a front for Lendina’s profitable smuggling business, as Hutch’s shadowy assigner, the Barber (a returning Colin Salmon), informs him, and she’s not about to let some nobody tourist get in her way.

 

The Barber instructs Hutch to “de-escalate” the situation; Lendina orders her stooges to “scorch earth” it. Guess whose command is followed?

 

It’s amusing to watch, in the same cathartic way as the first film, but you can’t help but think there could have been more to the story than just a rapidly rising pile of bashed and bloodied bodies.

 

There are hints throughout Nobody 2 that screenwriters Derek Kolstad and Aaron Rabin wanted to dig deeper into the psyches of the extended Mansell clan. These include a moment between Hutch, David and Harry in which they talk about how David’s own violent past and abandonment of his family might have led to their current unhappy situation.

 

That beat is barely given lip service before the fists start flying again, making Nobody 2 the rare film that should have been a bit longer. Its brisk 89-minute running time is normally welcome. In this case, though, it seems like some valuable character development was left on the cutting-room floor.

Also lost to the razor, apparently, is more about Becca, who at least gets to be part of the action this time.

 

Indonesia’s Tjahjanto, making his English-language debut, is the kind of filmmaker who jauntily plays When the Saints Go Marching In during a riverboat brawl and Céline Dion’s soaring ballad The Power of Love during the explosive finale.

 

The insane third act plays out like an ultraviolent Home Alone, if Kevin McCallister had a bit of help from Back to the Future‘s Doc Brown and the Wu-Tang Clan.

 

All of this is what most people would expect going into Nobody 2.

But it’s hard not to regret that Odenkirk, who brought so much depth and character to his sleazy lawyer Saul Goodman in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, is content to keep developing Hutch as a psychotic score-settler rather than seek the troubled man within the killing machine.

 

“I just want a break,” Hutch keeps telling his assailants.

Does he really? He seems to enjoy what he does, which includes setting a huge stack of cash on fire once again.

 

He’s probably thinking of the box-office potential of such possible future holiday-themed franchise expansions as Nobody Gives Thanks(giving) and Nobody Likes Christmas.

 

8.5/10

 

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