One of the joys of Ilya Naishuller’s 2021 action film Nobody was that it never took itself too seriously. It told the story of a man, Hutch Mansell (Bob Odenkirk), with a particular violent set of skills, who has become bored by the repetitive nature of suburban life. Supressing the killer within from his children and his community, everyone just assumes Hutch is a spinless individual who can’t even get the garbage on the curb on time.
Sealing his true self in the closet of suburbia, it only takes a chance encounter with the Russian mafia for the lock to be picked.
Naishuller’s film understood that the plot was merely a vessel to fill the film with plenty of amusing and well-choreographed action set pieces. However, the secret weapon to Nobody’s success was not Hutch’s fist of fury, but rather the healthy amount to dark humour that was injected into the film’s veins. The comedic element in Derek Kolstad’s script helped to set it apart from other John Wick-style action films being released today.
Sticking very close to the recipe of the first film, Timo Tjahjanto’s Nobody 2 fails to find its own unique flavour. Copying Naishuller’s structural formula to a tee, including opening with an interrogation and using a Home Alone inspired shootout as its climax, Tjahjanto’s film rest on the laurels of its predecessor rather than attempting to elevate it to new heights. While most sequels tend to up the stakes or, in the case of the John Wick franchise, delve deeper into the world it builds, Nobody 2 finds itself spinning in place.
Part of the problem is that Tjahjanto’s film cannot decide what direction to drive in. At its core the film wants to be a kinetic action flick that audiences enjoy without giving it too much thought. However, Nobody 2 also longs to make the motivations for the action more meaningful. To achieve this, the film misguidedly anchors itself in the murky waters of family.
The plot finds Hutch fully immersed in his butt-kicking work for The Barber (Colin Salmon) to pay off a 30-million-dollar debt he incurred when he burned the mafia’s money in the first film. While he takes glee in the violence he inflicts on others, the long hours required has put a strain on his marriage and is impacting his relationship with his kids. His wife Becca (Connie Neilsen) is on the brink of making an ultimatum and his son Brady (Gage Munroe) is starting to mimic his violent tendencies at school. Believing a family vacation is what everyone needs to reset and reconnect, Hutch decides to take the family, including daughter Sammy (Paisley Cadorath) and his father David (Christopher Lloyd), to the same waterpark in the town of Plummerville where he and his brother Harry (RZA) were taken in their youth.
Hoping to build lasting memories, it does not take long for the vacation to go sideways when an incident at the local arcade causes Hutch to run afoul with Abel (Colin Hanks), the sheriff of Plummerville, and Wyatt (John Ortiz), the son of the amusement park founder. Discovering that town has had a long of history of corruption, with the police working alongside a cartel led by the sadistic Lendina (Sharon Stone), Hutch must take matters into his own hands if he hopes to salvage his vacation.
Nobody 2 may find plenty of humour in the ways Hutch tries to balance controlling his rage and keeping his family oblivious to the the fact that Abel and others are after him, but the laughs fizzle out rather quickly. For all the film’s frenetic action beats, Tjahjanto’s film seems at a loss with what to do with Hutch’s family overall. Nobody 2 constantly references how the sins of the father have a direct impact on the son, but the film rarely shows fathers and sons interacting in a meaningfully way. Regardless of whether it’s Hutch/Brady, David/Hutch, Wyatt/Buddy (Ryan David Younes), one never feels the weight of fatherhood or the pressures of being a child in a father’s shadow.
By giving so much lip service to familial dynamics, without any intention of exploring them in any depth, the film takes valuable time away from the characters who are driving the action. A perfect example of this is Stone’s Lendina, a woman who should be a menacing force of chaos but feels underdeveloped on several levels. While Stone is delightful in the role, she is not given much space to explore the character in a deep way.
Filled with plenty of underwritten characters, and little room for them all to exist, Tjahjanto’s film fails to resonate on the same level of the first film. Even the film’s best action moments, for which there are a few standouts, do not excite audiences enough to be memorable. Choosing to simply mimic the chords of its predecessor, Nobody 2 plays like a greatest hits album by a cover band.
