I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s about fed up with the Middle-aged Family Man With Tortured Past Whose Rage Gets Triggered By Traumatic Event movie that regained its popularity in 2008 when Liam Neeson rocketed from prestige actor to Action Star in Taken. At their worst, these movies can be a troubling appeal to fascist tendencies, like Charles Bronson gunning down multicolored street thugs in the Death Wish series. At their best they can be fun, but an interview with Neeson a few years ago revealed a real sinister force behind even a throwaway thriller like Taken: the actor’s revealing that his motivation for the Man on a Mission role he’s become synonymous with was an incident in which he almost committed a hate crime is hard to separate from the shoot-‘em-ups and chases in what’s supposed to be an escapist movie.
Regardless, this role has become a rite of passage for a lot of aging male actors: Russell Crowe, Kevin Costner, Keanu Reeves, and now Bob Odenkirk. Though it’s interesting to see a considerably non-buff performer like Odenkirk kick ass, his vehicle Nobody isn’t much different from its predecessors.
It starts promisingly, introducing a hero entrenched in his averageness and not eager to leave it. Hutch (Odenkirk) has a good life as a regular old auto parts factory manager with a teenage son and a wife (Connie Nielsen) who’s a successful realtor. When their house is broken into one night, Hutch stops just short of going postal on the burglars. He instructs his family to stand back, lets the burglars take what they want, and calls the police. No one realizes that Hutch is a former special ops soldier who could, if he wanted to, take out an entire battalion singlehandedly. Like they do.
With this setup, Nobody could have been an interesting comment on the hypermasculine revenge drama rather than just another example of it. Director Ilya Naishuller makes it look like Hutch chickened out. Neighbors and co-workers all offer their thoughts on what they would’ve done if their house had been broken into. Hutch just smiles and nods. He knows what he was capable of doing, yet chose not to do. We learn later on that Hutch was being hypervigilant, not hesitant: he noticed the fear and desperation in the burglars’ voices, and that they had no bullets in their gun.
I thought that writer Derek Kolstad, who also wrote the John Wick movies, would take a similar approach here and create a righteously rageful hero whose driving force is empathy rather than wrath. The scenes where the men around Hutch belittle him for refusing to stand his ground are the best in the movie because they ironically play on masculinity rather than trumpet it. While the average Liam Neeson film is about a man protecting his castle, Nobody is about Liam Neeson living among a bunch of guys who think they’re Liam Neeson. Only he knows who he is.
As inventive as the idea is, it doesn’t last long. When Hutch saves a young girl from a gang of loud abusive Russians on a bus, he attracts the ire of a Typical Russian Mobster and the movie plunges headlong into dullsville. There are a few well-choreographed fight scenes, but they all seem so familiar. If you’ve seen John Wick, you won’t be surprised. The only real highlight is an appearance by Christopher Lloyd as Hutch’s father, where… I’ll just say that I thought I knew, and I didn’t.
On the complete flip side of this premise, Guy Ritchie (of all directors) does not spin his revenge thriller Wrath of Man into a lighthearted bruiser, but rather drives his characters straight to hell and lets us dwell there with them. His movie is also about a Man on a Mission, but he doesn’t glorify it. Ritchie’s men are broken and unfixable. There is no redemption, only pain.
At the center is Jason Statham, who unlike Odenkirk is the exact person we expect to be on a revenge mission. Ritchie knows this. Early scenes show him behaving calmly, patiently, unobtrusively, when we know something is bubbling underneath.
Statham is H, who’s hired by an armored car company at which the employees have names like Bullet, Boy Sweat Dave, and Hollow Bob. Everyone there is hiding something for one reason or another. We see H go through the hiring process. He barely passes the test: we see him fire a few stray bullets and almost fenderbend the truck. But he seems to be doing it on purpose. Instinctively, Jason Statham doesn’t seem like someone who messes up.
Our instincts are right. I won’t reveal what he’s up to, but H’s plan is a credible and fascinating one. Ritchie tells us the story in chapter format, starting with H's job interview, then changing points of view and revealing the surrounding events little by little. Characters played by the reliable and underappreciated Holt McCallany, as well as Josh Hartnett, Andy Garcia, Jeffrey Donovan, Scott Eastwood, and (oddest of all) Post Malone, factor into H's plot in ways I won't reveal. Once we know why H has embedded himself in with this crowd, the movie culminates in a heist sequence that's among the most exciting I've ever seen.
It’s anchored by Statham in a role that departs from his expected wiseguy character from the early Ritchie films and his smarmy antihero from Hobbs and Shaw. Since Ritchie and Statham started their careers together, maybe Ritchie is the only director who could have coaxed this performance from Statham, without ironic distance or smirking nihilism. He plays a hurt man, and he and Ritchie drag us into the hurt with him. The L.A. setting recalls Michael Mann’s work in its sun-drenched days, neon-drenched nights, and labyrinthine roadways and tunnels.
Ritchie’s victory is in the tone. He refuses to lighten it or let us bask in H’s brutality. A lot of thrillers like this don’t treat violence with real weight. This one does.
Nobody: ** out of ****
Wrath of Man: *** 1/2 out of ****
