Ever since Liam Neeson triumphed in 2009’s “Taken” — he was a simple man with “a particular set of skills” — the amount of retreads that resulted from it have become numbingly repetitive. You can make a good case that “Taken” has been the most influential, not to mention most copied, movie of the last 15 years. The proof is in the pudding: middle-aged actors who have attempted to be one-man killing machines since then include Bruce Willis (“Death Wish”), Ben Affleck (“The Accountant”) Denzel Washington (“The Equalizer”) Sean Penn (“The Gunman”), Kevin Costner (“3 Days to Kill”) and, most successfully, Keanu Reeves (“John Wick”).
Neeson and writer Luc Besson launched an action subgenre all its own. The formula was simple: the aging male superstar playing a world-weary former intel operative with a particular set of skills whose retirement is upended when a child/spouse/dog is threatened/abducted/killed, at which point he systematically hunts down and kills each and every one of the slimy Eastern European gangsters. Got that? Because Ilya Naishuller’s “Nobody” follows that same blueprint to a tee with Bob Odenkirk (whose talents deserve better) playing Hutch, the protagonist.
Two thieves break into Hutch’s suburban home one night, and Hutch declines to defend himself or his family. His teenage son, Blake (Gage Munroe), is disappointed by his cowardice and his relationship with his wife, Becca (Connie Nielsen), gets only more frigid because of Hutch’s inactions.
The aftermath of the incident eventually gets to Hutch, triggering the violent man within him and sending him on a brutal path of revenge via the usage of his lethal talents. The burglars end up being connected to a Russian mobster (Aleksey Serebryakov), a barrage of violence ensues and the same tired old tropes we’ve come to know since “Taken” get brought out.
The slick direction somewhat softens the blow; there’s enough camera trickery here to sustain your attention, but it all comes off without a pulse. You don’t care about the outcomes of the action scenes because, unlike the artful ballet of bullets Leitch and Stahelski concocted in the ‘John Wick’ movies, Naishuller isn’t able make you feel the visceral bone crunches, the stab wounds, the crashing cars etc.
David Cronenberg gave us the definitive man-killing-machine statement with 2005’s “A History of Violence,” a nastily rendered masterwork that didn’t just work as an action movie, but as a scathing treatise on the violent DNA that lingers inside all of us. Naishuller‘s film may feature a particularly inspired performance from Odenkirk, who deserves so much more than this trite, but it barely scratches the surface of Hutch. We want to root for him, but we’re not really given any reasons to. Yes, he has a family to defend, a moral compass to withhold, but it’s the same character schema that characterizes most protagonists in this diluted action subgenre.
There is an audience for a film like “Nobody,” one that demands brainless action until the fourth John Wick or the next Liam Neeson actioneer gets released. The rest of us have had enough of these movies. Naishuller doesn’t play around with the tropes as much as just adhere to them — there is nothing new or fresh about “Nobody,” it just sticks there like a retread of better and more invigorating movies.
SCORE: C-