Movie Review : Nobody (2021)

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If 2014’s film John Wick taught us anything, it’s that movies don’t always need a solid narrative structure. If they offer solid catharsis instead, people won’t give a shit if the main character learned anything. When someone murders a puppy, everybody wants to see that person getting hurt over and over and over again. Nothing else. Remove the puppy and you just have an absurdly violent guy letting loose on random interlopers. This is more or less the plot of Ilya Naishuller’s Nobody. To my surprise, it really, really works.

Written by John Wick’s Derek Kolstad (duh), Nobody tells the story of the most boring man in the world Hutch Mansell (Bob Odenkirk): father of two, holding an uninspiring accounting job for his father-in-law and pathologically unable to take the garbage out in time. You know the type. No one likes or respects him. Everything changes one night, after Hutch refuses to defend his house against two desperate robbers. Frustration peaks and the real Hutch comes out of hiding to fuck shit up.

Hutch vs Hutch

The easy criticism to make against this movie is that it doesn’t have any stakes. The bad guys are made out of cardboard and the violence is gratuitous. I disagree with that. I do not think the Russian mobster Hutch tortures in Nobody is the proper bad guy. That’s what’s brilliant about this movie. Yulian Kuznetsov (the great Aleksey Serebryakov) is just a vessel for Hutch to become himself again. The reason for his entire existence is to suffer and die at the hand of our protagonist. He’s a mean to self-expression.

At some point, Hutch burns his money for fuck’s sake. Do you know how fucking mean you have to be in order to do that? The only character I’ve even seen burn money in a movie was Joker in The Dark Knight and like Hutch, he did it to prove a point: money can be taken from you, but never your principles. If that doesn’t scream at you that Nobody wants nothing with common gangster movie tropes, I don’t know what will. Nobody is, first and foremost, the story of an existential rebirth through violence.

It doesn’t feel good to watch Hutch maim and kill Russian mobster because they did anything wrong (outside of being pretty creepy). It feels good because he becomes who he’s meant to be. He’s a man who finally assumes responsibility for having extraordinary skills and decides to yank a thorn off humanity’s collective foot by taking out an entire branch of organized crime by himself. If you’re rolling your eyes and telling yourself it’s a stupid male fantasy… well, you’re damn right it is. And it’s fucking awesome.

The ecstasy of fucking shit up

I really, really liked this movie. It is a brilliant example of how you do violent shlock in 2021. Movies like Cobra or Commando were really products of their time and would be impossible to imitate today without feeling campy and so is Nobody. Then, we loved big, strong men who defended us against a foreign menace. Now, we’re struggling against anxiety, self-awareness and a legion of other inner demons and Hutch Mansell is a hero of our times. Struggling against himself and a string of bad life choices.

Nobody is not exactly deep or complicated, but it doesn’t mean that it’s stupid or meaningless. It’s a film about the joy and ecstasy of fucking shit up. Of imposing your will and your identity upon the world. Do what what you’re good at. What you’re the best at. Not all of you will find the beauty in this. I understand if you thought this was stupid, gratuitous and repetitive, but it doesn’t say anything about the movie. It says something about how comfortable you are with yourself. It would still be great if it was about figure skating.

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This might freak you out, but… I think Nobody is the best film I’ve seen in 2021, so far? It’s not deep, but it’s visceral, oddly emotional and surgically precise. Shit, I was way more into it than the John Wick movies. Because Hutch Mansell is old, bruised and wrestles with problems that are so much more relatable. You might think I’m a weirdo for reviewing this movie so highly, but I don’t care. Nobody is great shlock. It’s all heart and zero self-awareness and it’s how I like my action movies.

8.8/10