“Want some pie?”
Follow me if you can. Somewhere out there in movieland there is a place called Normal that is anything but. And Nobody lives in the town of Normal. Of course, I’m really talking about Bob Odenkirk. He’s the actor who had a heart attack filming the last season of his Breaking Bad spin-off Better Call Saul. Now most actors will look at having a heart attack as a sign to slow down. That’s not what Odenkirk did. He decided to push himself by training for his first action film for five years with the stunt guys who did a lot of the John Wick action. That film was Nobody with Odenkirk playing the titular “Nobody”. The strange thing is that he had a ton of fun and was quite good in the role and ended up in a sequel. Not willing to take “no” for an answer, he is now starring in his third action film, which also happens to begin with the letters n o. This time out is with director Ben Wheatly and co-writer Darek Kolstad. The film is called Normal, and it’s a lot more fun than this setup might make you think. It’s not going to win any awards, and it’s not going to go down as a classic. What it will do is provide 90 fast-paced minutes of pure entertainment, and you know what? I’m OK with that.
Odenkirk plays Ulysses Richardson. He is a lawman who has never really settled down to one job. He makes his living traveling around the country and filling in for sheriffs as an interim sheriff, and usually he doesn’t make a lot of waves. He’s in the very small town of Nowhere, Minnesota, where he’s filling in for several weeks until a special election to pick the next full-time sheriff. Ryan Allen plays Deputy Blaine Anderson, who expects to be the next sheriff and is also just playing for time until he’s elected to the position. It appears like a nothing-to-see-here story setup, except Anderson among others has a deep and dangerous secret. The local bank vault contains the riches of the Japanese mob Yakuza. We meet the gang members early after they messed up a job and they escaped with their lives but not all of their fingers and they can’t afford to mess this situation up. But Richardson is starting to smell a rat, starting with Mayor Henry “The Fonz” Winkler. Of course, the character’s name is Kibner. I like The Fonz better. It turns out the town gets a cut to keep things quiet and calm. It might have stayed that way, but when a couple of yahoos rob the bank, the vault gets exposed, and this leads to the film’s first bloodbath. Once Richardson is in on the secret, he proposes that the town try to hide the carnage from the gunfight and other explosive events and pretend a car “accidentally” drove through the vault to keep the Yakuza guys from getting “concerned”. You noticed I said the first bloodbath. You see, a simple accident sets off yet a larger bloodbath that carries us through the last 20 minutes or so of the movie.
The first thing you have to know is that nobody, the collective nobody, is taking any of this seriously. The events that lead to the big action scenes look like they might have come out of a Monty Python sketch. I’d love to give you a couple of examples, but it will truly spoil your fun, and fun is all you’re getting out of this one, so I don’t want to do that. The action is all top-notch, but extraordinarily over the top. These guys do not spare the ammunition or the blood in this onem so just take it inm and maybe bring a ponchom because blood will be spreading everywhere. The movie certainly borrows from the Nobody filmsm and that’s not a surprisem because co-writer Kolstad was involved in writing those films. They reuse the threat of maybe blowing up the mob’s money, and a few of the sight gags will feel a little familiar.
Here’s the thing that makes it work. It’s not the great stunts or all of those bullets and blood. It’s Odenkirk. He comes across as one of the most likable action guys I’ve ever seen. Notice I did not say action hero. Richardson is no more of a hero than Hutch was in Nobody. His situation is quite accidental. He doesn’t set out to be a hero or this active. When Odenkirk falls into all of this mayhem he’s completely believable, and that’s the key to the whole ball of wax here. There hasn’t been a reluctant hero like this since the days of Don Knotts. Odenkirk is compelling, and he’s why all of the other gags work. Take him out of the equation and I’m not sure there’s much of a movie here.
Finally, you can’t help but also make comparisons to Fargo. There’s a lot of that north-mid-west culture and feel to the show. A couple of the characters would have fit in perfectly here. The music choices during the bloodbaths also brings a rather fresh approach to the action film. There’s just something so ridiculously simple and comical about the whole thing that you’ll walk out with your 90 minutes worth. Normal doesn’t overstay it’s welcome, and now neither will I. “It’s my one trick.”
