<\/p>\n
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<\/i> 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 \u201cNobody 2,\u201d the new Bob Odenkirk action thriller \u2014 and what a gloriously odd sequence of words that still is \u2014 don\u2019t want to know.<\/p>\n
Those makers include \u201cJohn Wick\u201d and \u201cNobody\u201d scribe Derek Kolstad (working here with co-writer Aaron Rabin) and director Timo Tjahjanto, a German Indonesian action auteur in his English-language debut.<\/p>\n
More broadly, \u201cNobody 2,\u201d a sequel to the 2021 Odenkirk-starring sleeper \u201cNobody<\/a>,\u201d is another product of the fight-centric production company 87North, which made a big, bloody splash with \u201cJohn Wick\u201d 11 years ago and has been offering up minor, nay, minute<\/i> variations on that movie\u2019s 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-\u2019em-up genre \u2014 your Keanus, your Brads, your Ke Huy Quans \u2014 and their hit rate is decidedly mixed. \u201cLove Hurts,\u201d their good-faith effort to build a franchise around the more than deserving Mr. Quan earlier this year, was particularly dire<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n But even in such an environment, Odenkirk\u2019s admirably eclectic r\u00e9sum\u00e9 makes him a uniquely left-field candidate. Discarding his many Emmy nominations for his role on \u201cBreaking Bad\u201d and \u201cBetter Call Saul,\u201d Odenkirk must be the only former off-camera \u201cSaturday Night Live<\/a>\u201d 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 \u201cGlengarry Glen Ross<\/a>\u201d earned him a Tony Award nomination<\/a>. Maybe if the yeggs and crooked lawmen he takes on \u201cNobody 2\u201d knew about all that, they wouldn\u2019t be in such a hurry to bludgeon, stab, and\/or shoot him.<\/p>\n The setup this time around is that Odenkirk\u2019s Hutch, sensing that spouse Becca (played by Connie Nielsen) is losing patience with his late nights and absences from their kids\u2019 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<\/a>, who looks roughly 10 minutes older than he did \u201cBack to the Future\u201d 40 years ago, took him on a holiday when he was a kid. \u201cWe\u2019re making memories,\u201d Hutch tells his household, sounding more like he\u2019s trying to sell himself on the idea than to convince them.<\/p>\n