Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #235 Nobody (2021)

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like four kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker, actor or television show. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career. That’s also true of the motion pictures and television projects of the late Tawny Kitaen. 

A generous patron is now paying me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I’m deep into a look at the complete filmography of troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart. Oh, and I’m delving deep into the filmographies of Oliver Stone and Virginia Madsen for you beautiful people as well. 

When Bob Odenkirk segued from acting to directing with Melvin Goes to Dinner, Let’s Go to Prison and The Brothers Solomon I got the distinct impression that, like many talented and untalented actors and creators, he had lost interest in acting and saw himself primarily as a filmmaker. 

True, Odenkirk had small roles in all of the films he directed but they were the furthest thing from Bob Odenkirk vehicles. When Let’s Go to Prison and The Brothers Solomon bombed on a historic level not long after Run, Ronnie, Run broke the hearts of Mr. Show fans and comedy lovers everywhere, the idea of people paying good money to see a movie starring Bob Odenkirk was all but inconceivable. 

Thanks to his work as a writer and/or performer on Saturday Night Live, The Ben Stiller Show, Get a Life, Mr. Show and The Larry Sanders Show, Odenkirk has long been heralded as a cult icon and bona fide comic genius. 

But Odenkirk was no one’s idea of a box-office attraction or major draw. After transforming the goofy dad from Malcolm in the Middle into a wildly misunderstood badass icon a la Heath Ledger’s Joker, Breaking Bad turned a comedy writer’s comedy writer into a respected dramatic actor, albeit of the darkly comic variety. 

Then Better Call Saul turned Odenkirk into a leading man, a household name and a four time Emmy nominee for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series. The success and popularity of Better Call Saul also made it possible for Odenkirk to make the remarkable leap from cult comedy icon to dramatic actor to critically acclaimed big-screen action hero. 

Odenkirk’s Breaking Bad-fueled hot streak transformed “John Wick but with Bob Odenkirk” from the premise for a misconceived Funny or Die sketch to an irresistible hook for a major motion picture. 

2021’s Nobody is essentially John Wick With Bob But Not David. If you love the motion picture John Wick and the actor Bob Odenkirk the way that I do that’s a can’t-miss proposition. Moviegoers felt the same way. Despite its release being delayed and muted by COVID 19, Nobody was a solid hit, grossing over fifty million at the box-office and I would imagine a great deal more on DVD, Blu Ray and streaming. 

This’ll really make Ronnie run!

Nobody at least comes by its resemblance to John Wick honestly. It was written by Derek Kolstad, the creator of John Wick, the screenwriter of John Wick and John Wick 2 as well as the co-screenwriter of John Wick 3: Parabellum and was produced by David Lietch, the producer and uncredited co-director of John Wick. 

The film was directed by Ilya Naishuller, the Russian musician and filmmaker behind the first-person action flop Hardcore Henry but judging from the film’s darkly comic tone, grim fatalism and blue-black color palette, it feels like Kolstad and Lietch’s primary advice to Naishuller was to shoot it exactly like a John Wick movie. 

So even though Nobody is not technically a John Wick movie it sure feels like a spiritual sequel with Saul Goodman instead of Ted “Theodore” Logan as a badass anti-hero who is very good at doing very bad things to very bad people. 

But before Odenkirk’s man of ultra-violence can go all Jason Bourne on the Russian mafia he at first cuts an almost perversely meek, even milquetoast figure.

When Nobody begins Hutch Mansell (Odenkirk) is a committed family man working a comfortable but moderately soul-crushing job and living an utterly undistinguished life of mind-numbing routine and repetition. 

That all changes one night when some desperate characters break into Hutch’s house and he lets the intruders get away rather than risk his son or wife getting killed or seriously injured. 

leaving the lights on unnecessarily is like BURNING money!

The slight everyman suffers a series of emasculating comments from coworkers and law enforcement officers who do not realize that behind Hutch’s mild mannered facade lies the mind and impeccably trained body of someone uniquely skilled in the art of assassination. 

I don’t want to give away too much, but seeing as how the film was correctly and successfully sold as John Wick with Bob Odenkirk it should not come as a surprise that Odenkirk’s character turns out to be a John Wick-like master of righteous murder. 

The home invasion awakens something in Hutch that has been dormant for years, even decades. It reconnects him with the man he used to be and places him on a deadly collision course with a Russian mobster as terrifying as he is unpredictable. 

If that sounds suspiciously like the set-up for John Wick, it should. The execution owes an unmistakable, uncanny resemblance to John Wick as well, right down to a color palette that mirrors a bruise: black and blue and inky and dark as midnight. 

Nobody also resembles John Wick in the nimble manner in which it dodges the many landmines and pitfalls endemic in revenge-based vigilante thrillers, which tend to be seedy and unpleasant at best and amoral and fascist at worst. 

Odenkirk doesn’t start kicking ass until nearly a half hour into Nobody. Before Nobody veers wildly into the world of international super-assassins it makes sure to ground the action in very real emotions. 

As a father and lover of dad jokes, it gave me an almost unseemly amount of joy when Hutch’s teenaged son asks him about bruises he incurred beating the shit out of some punks and he jokes that you should see the other guy, which might just represent the first time in film history that that has doubled as both a corny dad joke AND a badass statement of fact. The other guys did, in fact, look much worse on account of him beating the shit out of them. 

Destroying men young enough to be his children restores Hutch’s lost lust for life and slumbering libido. Everything’s better when you’re realizing your destiny and killing all of the bad people in your city for fun and revenge. 

The food tastes better. The air is sweeter. It’s easier to get and maintain an erection. Yes, nothing transforms a man from zero to hero quite like using their training to injure, torture and murder evildoers and ne’er do wells. 

Whereas Bruce Willis sleep-walked through a similar part in the DOA remake of Death Wish Odenkirk smartly underplays the role of a man who doesn’t need to talk loudly or make a spectacle of himself because his abilities speak for themselves. 

I was very excited about Nobody before I discovered that it costarred Christopher Lloyd and RZA as people very close to our hero and similarly skilled. That ratcheted up my excitement even further. 

I was not disappointed. Nobody is exactly what it appears to be. Even better, it’s what it promises to be as well—a lean, mean thriller with John Wick-style action from a delightfully unexpected but inspired source. 

It took Odenkirk a very long time to reach the very weird place in his career where he could dramatically assert himself as a hot new action star despite nearing sixty. I can’t wait to see what he does next as an unlikely man of action, particularly if it’s the sequel to Nobody that Kolstad is apparently working on even if a follow-up has not been officially green-lit. 

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