Nobody 2’s action unfortunately goes from giddily sinister to hammy and exhausting, the movie too busy delighting in pulverized bodies to make room for characters.Allen Fraser/The Associated Press
Nobody 2
Directed by Timo Tjahjanto
Written by Derek Kolstad and Aaron Rabin
Starring Bob Odenkirk, Connie Nielsen, John Ortiz, RZA, Colin Hanks, with Christopher Lloyd and Sharon Stone
Classification 14A; 89 minutes
Opens in theatres Aug. 15
Sharon Stone makes a big, devilish entrance in Nobody 2, the sequel to 2021’s skull-smashing action romp starring Better Call Saul’s Bob Odenkirk. She’s playing Lendina, a sneering and slithering kingpin who is introduced enjoying the opportunity to inflict maximum corporeal punishment – not just on the perpetrator but also any witnesses to the scene – when she catches patrons cheating at the casino she owns .
It’s a fun moment full of carnage – easy to digest because there’s little in Nobody 2 worth taking seriously – as well as a knowing callback to Casino, Martin Scorsese’s 30-year-old epic in which Stone gave a career-best performance as the woman who refused to just hang off the arms of Robert De Niro’s Vegas boss.
This time she gets to be the one calling the shots in yet another testosterone-fuelled canvas. But her performance is also one-note, in a movie that’s too busy delighting in pulverized bodies to make room for characters to be anything more. As the medley of violence continues, Stone’s mugging goes from giddily sinister to hammy and exhausting. Same goes for Nobody 2, and also the post-John Wick wave of action movies it’s part of.
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Like the original Nobody, the Manitoba-shot sequel comes from John Wick’s writer and producer, Derek Kolstad and David Leitch, respectively. They’re not just emulating the delightfully chaotic and visceral action choreography that ignited their brand, but also the trend in modern action movies where a weathered professional killer is jolted out of retirement when unsuspecting baddies disrupt the domesticity to which they’re struggling to adapt (see also Taken and The Equalizer).
That was the premise in Nobody, in which Odenkirk’s Hutch had a hard time taking the trash out in time for garbage collection and staying complacent in a thankless office job. An incidental run-in with a Russian mob woke him out of suburban slumber and had him knocking the teeth out of bad guys.
Sharon Stone’s character in Nobody 2 is a knowing callback to Casino, in which she gave a career-best performance.The Associated Press
We find him in Nobody 2 still doing just that. This time Hutch is executing brutal contract jobs taking out Asian, Corsican and Brazilian gangsters because he’s paying down a multimillion-dollar debt absorbed from the last outing. He’s also missing precious time with his family, leaving blood stains on his iPhone screen when he texts home that his job is making him late for dinner. The relieved half smile Odenkirk relaxes into when he gets a simple and defeated “Ok, I love you” text back from his wife (Connie Nielsen) is one of those moments where Nobody 2 achieves more than the chuckles it typically aims for.
That’s largely thanks to Odenkirk, who is great not just with the dry humour but with wearing Hutch’s contradictions and existential crisis on his endlessly fascinating face. He’s got that hardened but lost stare, with a soft vulnerability in his eyes and a voice that sounds like it’s trying to liven up after being dragged across concrete. His Hutch seems to be soul-searching for some inner peace and calm but also finds satisfaction in doing what he does best – channelling his anger to impale those who deserve it. And he desperately craves family bonding time, even if that means subduing his baser instincts for the sake of his kids.
Odenkirk brings all that into the early moments when Nobody 2 goes all National Lampoon’s Vacation, with Hutch leading his family back to an old amusement park he fondly remembers from his childhood, only to discover it’s a tourist trap run by a crime syndicate. The early thrashing he rains down on bullying security guards at an arcade – at one point using a guy’s head to play whack-a-mole – is exhilarating because of the conviction Odenkirk brings to it, and because Indonesian director Timo Tjahjanto’s has a knack for lively close-quarters combat.
The Manitoba-shot Nobody 2 comes from Derek Kolstad and David Leitch, the writer and producer of John Wick.The Associated Press
Unfortunately, such joys wear thin long before we get to the silly Home Alone-style climax set in a booby-trapped amusement park. The action choreography gives way to land mines in ball pits, a rigged pendulum ride and a waterslide with spears, before the whole thing goes up in flames.
Blowing up an amusement park is a fitting allegory for this movie’s dog days of summer release, however, since the season in which mind-numbing fare such as Nobody 2 tends to thrive in is finally, and thankfully, coming to an end.
