Presumably there are at least a few schlubby dads in this nation of 340 million whose bone-deep melancholy and chronic distraction from their families is not the natural by-product of having accrued a triple-digit body count during a decades-long career as a covert super-assassin. If there are, the makers of “Nobody 2,” the new Bob Odenkirk action thriller — and what a gloriously odd sequence of words that still is — don’t want to know.
Those makers include “John Wick” and “Nobody” scribe Derek Kolstad (working here with co-writer Aaron Rabin) and director Timo Tjahjanto, a German Indonesian action auteur in his English-language debut.
More broadly, “Nobody 2,” a sequel to the 2021 Odenkirk-starring sleeper “Nobody,” is another product of the fight-centric production company 87North, which made a big, bloody splash with “John Wick” 11 years ago and has been offering up minor, nay, minute variations on that movie’s super-killer-coaxed-from-retirement premise ever since. Their films are notable for starring actors whose Very Particular Set of Skills are not limited to the shoot-’em-up genre — your Keanus, your Brads, your Ke Huy Quans — and their hit rate is decidedly mixed. “Love Hurts,” their good-faith effort to build a franchise around the more than deserving Mr. Quan earlier this year, was particularly dire.
There was a time when dinosaurs like Clint and Arnold and Sly plotted, with variable degrees of success, to graduate from action flicks and be taken seriously. That all changed early on in the Obama years, when Oscar-player all-rounders like Tom Cruise, Denzel Washington, and Liam Neeson decided, a couple of decades into their careers, that what they really wanted was to take a long detour into the throat-punching game.
But even in such an environment, Odenkirk’s admirably eclectic résumé makes him a uniquely left-field candidate. Discarding his many Emmy nominations for his role on “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul,” Odenkirk must be the only former off-camera “Saturday Night Live” writer to headline an action franchise more than 30 years later. This spring, his Broadway debut as sad-sack salesman Shelley Levene in a revival of “Glengarry Glen Ross” earned him a Tony Award nomination. Maybe if the yeggs and crooked lawmen he takes on “Nobody 2” knew about all that, they wouldn’t be in such a hurry to bludgeon, stab, and/or shoot him.
The setup this time around is that Odenkirk’s Hutch, sensing that spouse Becca (played by Connie Nielsen) is losing patience with his late nights and absences from their kids’ sporting events, proposes a family getaway to a decaying theme park/resort in the fictitious upper Midwestern everytown of Peary County, Wis., the one place his father, played again by Christopher Lloyd, who looks roughly 10 minutes older than he did “Back to the Future” 40 years ago, took him on a holiday when he was a kid. “We’re making memories,” Hutch tells his household, sounding more like he’s trying to sell himself on the idea than to convince them.
Despite his deep ties to the criminal underworld, Hutch is unaware that the town is effectively Sodom and Gomorrah making a halfhearted attempt to pass itself off as Mayberry. Its org chart of creeps spans from Colin Hanks’s crooked sheriff to John Ortiz’s figurehead crime lord, to the one thug to rule them all — Sharon Stone! Given her humble beginnings in this genre, playing truly thankless roles like Steven Seagal’s wife in “Above the Law” (1988), it’s a delight to see Stone go full ham here. Like Orson Welles in “The Third Man,” she gets to flex by delaying her entrance until more than halfway through the picture, which, by the way, runs an anachronistically svelte 89 minutes. No one tries to charge her with smoking, but Hutch does take violent exception to her threatening his kids.
Your ability to enjoy “Nobody 2” will hang entirely upon how much nourishment and/or diversion you can wring from small cinematic pleasures: Odenkirk’s gift for making a line like “The cops over here — they’re in league with the big syndicate” sound like something a human might say, for example. Or the fact that Tjahjanto or his music supervisor scored a hand-to-hand fight on a boat with a brass band instrumental of “When the Saints Go Marching In,” a funny needle drop in a movie that’s otherwise full of rote ones. Or the way the movie joins the rarefied company of the third “Die Hard” and the second “Captain America” by making an impressive entry in the Elevator Fight Scene Hall of Fame.
You also get a fun sequence in which Hutch and an unexpected ally booby-trap the theme park for a showdown with Sharon and the Family Stone — placing land mines in the ball pit and that sort of thing. Best of all, RZA returns as Hutch’s brother, and this time he gets to do a sort of 60-second version of the samurai epic the Wu-Tang Clan front man has always wanted to make.
Making memories it ain’t. But making 89 minutes of your life disappear almost painlessly has its place, too.
R. At area theaters. Pervasive tooth dislodging, digit severing violence and profanity.
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