In Timo Tjahjanto’s “Nobody 2,” Bob Odenkirk returns as Hutch, a beleaguered husband and father who attempts — with little success — to balance his boring suburban domestic existence with his day job as a deadly, highly trained assassin. He swears to his wife Becca (Connie Nielsen) that he’ll be home in time for dinner, but he usually gets delayed ramming butterknives into the throats of wealthy drug-runners. Both Hutch and Becca are a little afraid of the violence Hutch is capable of. He clearly has a great deal of inner rage, and Hutch fears that his murderous impulses could be triggered unexpectedly.
The plot of this sequel involves Hutch trying to take his family on vacation to a run-down amusement park (one he used to adore as a kid), only to find that the park has been overtaken by a super criminal mastermind (Sharon Stone). Hutch’s first glimpse at the darkness of the town comes when his kids (Gage Munroe, Paisley Cadorath) are playing at a local video arcade and run afoul of some bullies. There is a brief scuffle, leading to the entire family being ejected from the arcade. While they are filing out, one of the arcade managers, in a fit of unprovoked bullying, smacks Hutch’s young daughter on the back of the head. Hutch is livid, and the audience can see his blood beginning to boil. Out on the sidewalk, Hutch announces that he briefly needs to re-enter the arcade to retrieve his wallet. We know, however, that he is re-entering the arcade to enact violent acts of bloody vengeance.
Hutch will spend the bulk of the film’s trim 89-minute running time dispensing mayhem and committing murder. It’s a slight film, but it’s pretty fun.
Odenkirk talked about that moment in a recent interview with Collider, and he recalls that he wanted the arcade scene — specifically the moment when Hutch sees his daughter being smacked — to be underplayed as much as possible. It needed to be incidental. Hence, when Hutch “breaks,” it seems all the more dramatic.
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Bob Odenkirk wanted Hutch’s trigger moment to be as small as possible
The Mansell family in vacation wear in Nobody 2 – Universal Pictures
There was a way to film and edit the head-smacking moment for maximum dramatic effect, of course. The filmmakers could have included close-ups of Hutch’s angry eyes, or a slow-motion shot of the arcade worker thwacking the young girl. Odenkirk, however, knew that the scene would play better if the moment was natural and not placed in the center of the frame. If the moment was meant to trigger Hutch’s violent wrath, then it would be more shocking and carry more weight if it stemmed from a brief, almost unacknowledged moment. Even Hutch should be surprised when a brief, small act of violence against his family forced him to become an eye-gouging machine. In Odenkirk’s words:
“It’s almost like the guy isn’t even thinking. […] Like, ‘Oh, why did I do that? That’s awful, what I did.’ And it’s just small enough that nobody thinks it hurt her at all. Nobody. Even the girl is like, ‘What? What was that?’ It’s got to be so small that you can’t justify anything outside of, ‘Hey, don’t do that.’ But of course it is big. It is huge. It is a huge f***ing a**hole move, and it’s the kind of thing that can happen to you in the world … You have to eat it. But in a movie, you don’t have to.”
Indeed, the moment is a cathartic violence fantasy for anyone in the audience who has been lightly smacked, or who has witnessed when a member of their family is lightly smacked. We may be angered in such moments, but we don’t have the wrath — or the wherewithal — to savagely beat up the offender. “Nobody 2” allowed Hutch to take symbolic, cinematic revenge against the bullies of the world.
And Odenkirk is right. A small, seemingly incidental moment of offense will indeed become huge when juxtaposed against Hutch’s reaction to it. It makes “Nobody 2” a hair more dramatic.
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