Nobody 2 Review: A Surprisingly Fun Sequel That Defies Low Expectations

It seems like audiences have conclusively grown tired of comic riffs on the “John Wick” formula, where unassuming protagonists are revealed to be cold-blooded assassins with exquisite fighting and marksmanship. Even with an additional high concept thrown into the mix — as was the case with the Jack Quaid vehicle “Novocaine” that Looper also reviewed, about an ordinary man-turned-vigilante with a condition where he couldn’t feel pain — it’s reheating a trope that’s been done to death. The paltry box office returns for “From the World of John Wick: Ballerina” suggest that this fatigue is creeping into perceptions of the franchise that started this trend off, too. 

The sequel to “Nobody,” one of the earliest notable titles that feasibly began life with the elevator pitch “What if an ordinary man was actually John Wick?,” now arrives as the likely final nail in the coffin of this wave of action movies. The original Bob Odenkirk film was a modest hit in early 2021, when most theaters still had their doors nailed shut due to the last wave of lockdowns, and benefitted heavily from lack of major competition as titles were still getting reliably dumped on streaming by the week. Audiences weren’t necessarily clamoring for a sequel, and if we’re being honest, the first movie ran out of steam by the midway point when a straightforward robbery revenge narrative concluded and Odenkirk’s Hutch picked a fight with the Russian mafia straight out of left field.

In “Nobody 2,” the trailers tease that most tired of sequel premises — sending the characters on vacation, a typical sign that the writers had no clear vision of where to take the story next, so they rely on a change of scenery to keep things fresh.

For the best part of the first act, “Nobody 2” is the lazy, uninspired, who-asked-for-this sequel you likely assumed it would be, filled to the brim with throwaway references to the first — Hutch never takes the garbage out in time to be collected! — that you wouldn’t remember unless you rewatched it in the previous 48 hours. But once the family (including Hutch’s wife Becca and father David, played by Connie Nielsen and Christopher Lloyd respectively) agree to go on vacation to the tourist town of Plummerville, where Hutch had happy memories as a kid, the movie starts taking advantage of its overly familiar vacation formula. This is where director Timo Tjahjanto, an Indonesian action wunderkind making his English-language debut, is revealed to be the sequel’s not-so-secret weapon, elevating each tired and clichéd turn in a genre tale about the underworld of a corrupt small town through a relentless array of gloriously staged, uproariously silly fights and bullet battles.

If you’ve got an action movie obsessed friend in your life, you’ve probably heard them endlessly praise Tjahjanto’s earlier films — especially the Iko Uwais-starring “The Night Comes For Us.” His hiring appears to be the only singularly creative decision made in the pre-production process when it came to bringing this lazy script to life, but in his hands, every hacky, overly-familiar beat is complemented by an eager inventiveness in the action set pieces they accompany. There are early signs of life in a flashback scene where Bob Odenkirk’s unassuming hero fights off a gaggle of goons in an elevator, but the true slapstick gold doesn’t kick off until we’re firmly in vacation territory. The inciting incident is Hutch’s son punching a bully at an arcade, with a security guard hitting Hutch’s young daughter as they are escorted off the premises; in a genre that’s so often riddled with hyper-macho power fantasies, this is one of the more relatable motivations for revenge you could conceive of, blown up to cartoonish proportions.

Despite being ill-fittingly scored to The Offspring’s “Come Out And Play” — one of several bizarre needle-drops, sandwiched on the soundtrack between British girl group Little Mix and a classic rock cover of “Ring Of Fire” — the fight choreography remains on point, utilizing every possible attraction in an arcade as a weapon, from pitch-hitting baseball bats to whack-a-mole tables. The film remains at its most enjoyable when it similarly takes advantage of each location’s litany of attractions, building up to a third act shootout where every ride in a theme park is reconfigured as a bloody booby trap, the bodies piling up due to landmines in ball pits and spikes hidden in water slides. It may represent the franchise jumping the shark with how over-the-top it gets, frequently crosscutting between this carnage and RZA single-handedly slicing up members of the attacking death squad with a Katana, but the most primal part of my brain was too satisfied to care.

Elsewhere, the hierarchy of corruption in the small town takes in a police unit — led by a cast-against-type Colin Hanks -– paid off by a bootlegging operation overseen by a ruthless businesswoman played by Sharon Stone, relishing the opportunity to camp it up even if she arrives too late to be a properly effective threat. It’s a performance which acts in opposition to the machismo we usually expect from these movies, the kind designed to be commemorated for “celebrating women’s wrongs” by the type of audience who would never sit through a movie like this. What it doesn’t do, however, is distract from just how much the women of this world are short-changed again, with Connie Nielsen relegated to the background once the carnage starts, never getting stuck into the action despite expressing her wish to get more involved during the press tour for the first film. The actress has said that she’d hoped a sequel would dive further into the couple’s past but never probes as far as it should to add any greater depth on this front. Bob Odenkirk and Nielsen work well together onscreen, but the plot machinations are eager to get them to spend time apart as soon as the ball starts rolling.

As far as sequels nobody asked for go, “Nobody 2” is in the higher tiers, bringing enough joyously inventive action to the plate that it almost — almost! — makes you overlook how obvious it was the writers didn’t know where to take these characters next. But then again, this is the only genre where you can paper over the flaws with a handful of well-staged set pieces, and thanks to Timo Tjahjanto, it manages to upstage the original on that front.

“Nobody 2” premieres in theaters on August 15.