Nobody 2

The Weight of the Weekend

There’s a special kind of misery baked into the family vacation that absolutely has to be fun. You can feel it in the forced cheer inside the minivan, the overpriced tickets, the silent agreement that if everyone sticks to the schedule maybe nobody will notice how frayed things really are. *Nobody 2* takes that exact suburban panic and straps it to a guy who also happens to owe the criminal underworld $30 million. That's the odd, bloody pulse of the sequel: a dad-with-a-secret-past movie that decides to spend its time on rusted water slides and marital exhaustion.



When the first *Nobody* arrived four years ago, it ran on one clean joke: what if Saul Goodman turned out to be John Wick? That novelty is gone now. Hutch Mansell's family already knows who he is and what he does. So Timo Tjahjanto, making his Hollywood debut after proving himself in Indonesian horror and action, has to find a different angle. Rather than darken everything, he pushes it toward neon sleaze. Plummerville is a shabby amusement-park town that feels like Walley World after the paint peeled off and the local power structure got taken over by crooks and traffickers.



Tjahjanto gets something important about this series: the violence only works if it's a little funny, and it's only funny if Hutch looks like he'd rather be doing almost anything else. Early on, the Mansells are killing time in a sad little arcade when Hutch's son Brady gets into it with a local bully. The scuffle itself is tiny and embarrassing. Odenkirk doesn't square up like an action idol. He just sags. His jaw hardens the way it does when you discover another leak in the house. So when the situation detonates and drags in a grubby local sheriff played with greasy delight by Colin Hanks, it doesn't feel triumphant. It feels like a middle-aged man failing, once again, to keep his temper from wrecking the day.



The whole movie really hangs on Bob Odenkirk's face. After years of making a meal out of language—from sketch comedy to *Breaking Bad* to his recent turn as the desperate windbag Shelly Levene in *Glengarry Glen Ross*—he plays Hutch as someone who has run out of words. The man communicates in sighs, pauses, and sudden acts of geometry. As Vulture's critic wrote, Odenkirk nails "the particular unease of the modern middle-aged male, uncomfortable in realms both spectacular and mundane." He can pulp a room of Russian gangsters with a fire extinguisher, sure, but a normal conversation with his wife Becca (Connie Nielsen, stuck doing mostly reaction work) still defeats him.

I'm not going to oversell it. *Nobody 2* is a cheerful Saturday-afternoon slaughterfest, complete with RZA carving through henchmen with a katana and Sharon Stone having a blast as a flamboyant crime boss. The plot is barely there. It's just a line to hang fights on. Still, there's a sour little truth underneath the nonsense that gives it some aftertaste: you don't outrun yourself by changing locations. A vacation won't do it. A new town won't do it. And if you're Hutch Mansell, you'll probably wreck half the scenery before you admit that.