Surely by now he's a Somebody. Surely
dir: Timo Tjahjanto
2025
Nobody 2 is maybe the sequel nobody wanted to a film called Nobody, which someone wanted because it was a minor hit. Premised with “what if you had a middle aged guy bored with his life who decides to go on John Wick- like rampages just for shits and giggles and because his family think he’s pathetic?” it really struck a chord with shlubs and schlemiels everywhere.
Wow, what a premise. So in the first flick the main guy was bored, enervated, listless, a lump to his wife and kids, going through the motions, despite having been at an earlier point in his life a government sanctioned killer of killers. He decides to come out of retirement not because of any crisis or because anyone killed his dog or anything; it’s just because he’s bored.
And he beats up some Russians, which leads to needing to kill more Russians, and by the end he has to kill all the Russians. And then everyone; wife, children, dog, they are satisfied and grateful, and Hutch (Bob Odenkirk) gives up his boring job and goes back to killing people full time. Everybody’s happy!
This sequel is predicated on the premise that even someone really good at killing would get bored of his job eventually. It entirely replicates the whole basis of the first flick, being that Hutch is working in such a dedicated fashion that it’s indistinguishable from the mundane job he was previously doing down at the cracker factory that left him disconnected from his family and dissatisfied with life in general. So, it’s exactly where the first one started from, but it tenders a different solution to his existential malaise this time: maybe a holiday from all the killings will help Hutch reconnect with his family, by actually spending time with them?
A holiday, to the one place Hutch remembers from his childhood: Plummerville! A shitty looking waterpark somewhere in the heartland of America. Wouldn’t you know it, though, the town near the waterpark is filled with crims and corrupt cops, and none of them want Hutch to reconnect with his family at all.
Hutch spends no time with his family, but lots of time killing people in order to protect his family, because what else is he going to do? This isn’t a flick where a guy learns the limitations of continuing to do the same thing over and over again hoping for a different result: it’s one that celebrates the fact that he’s good at that one thing, and he should do it again and again for our ongoing and never waning amusement forevermore.
The director of this highly unnecessary flick is an Indonesian director I follow, because he made an amazing action flick that I saw on Netflix called The Night Comes for Us. Yes, everything he’s done since then has disappointed me greatly, but I hang on to hope. It’s all you can do sometimes.
I think it’s great that he’s making unnecessary sequels to unnecessary action flicks like this: this would be a mid-budget flick from American action flick standards, but way more money than he’s previously had to work with. In fact the budget here is more than he’s ever spent on all the other flicks he’s made to date combined. And next he’ll be making an unnecessary sequel to The Beekeeper, where Jason Statham will wearily kill a whole other bunch of young people while making bee-related puns, one hopes.
All of this is great for the director. Doesn’t mean the film is that great. It passes the time. It doesn’t outstay its welcome. It isn’t too insulting to the intelligence. It doesn’t really have much to say other than that fathers think they’re doing the right thing for their kids, but often they set a poor example, and their kids end up both hating them yet emulating them, which is all sorts of profound. And yet some hope remains that our kids will be better than us, or at least not have to do the shitty things we did in order to support them, support ourselves and keep ourselves amused.
Yes, like I keep saying, this flick is unnecessary, but most are, and the first Nobody definitely was, so this has to be too. Rarely have I seen a film that pandered to middle-aged middle-class white guys as much, patting them on the head, slapping them on the back and saying “yeah, it’s the obligations placed on you by the heteronormative constraints of marriage and family, and late stage capitalism that has you feeling like this; otherwise you’d be an absolute alpha lone wolf tiger shark!”
This flick’s pandering in a different way. This one says something like “you think a holiday away or that cruise you’re planning is going to make everything okay, but it’s really not, because all the bullshit bothering you is going to follow you anyway. Might as well get used to it and do what you always do. There is no escape from the pedestrian and the mundane!” Come to think of it, that’s less pandering, and more downright depressing.
Maybe it’s more honest? Who knows. Well, we know the dictates of an action flick means Hutch has to get into all sorts of bad situations and that he’s going to have to kill a whole bunch of people until there are none left, and then everything can return to normal. In this instance, we’re made to think initially that if he can just kill a corrupt sheriff played by Colin Hanks, famous son of Samantha Lewes and some other guy, then everything will be okay. But no. For some reason, they thought they had to aim higher. Killing Colin Hanks can’t be the climax of this or any other flick, no, we need a deranged mob boss played by Sharon Stone to be the absolute highlight of the flick.
Sharon Stone is… a lot in this flick. Utterly feral, and not entirely believable as a vamping crime boss lunatic, but I’m glad she’s still getting work. Better her than me, probably.
These are, really, cartoons. They’re live action cartoons, and this director knows how to make cartoonish movies. They’re fun if you like your cartoons to have extreme violence in them amidst the explosions and the faceless goons getting slaughtered in their hundreds, but this flick isn’t much beyond literally using sticks of dynamite. No-one really thinks any of the family are going to get hurt, let alone killed, and everyone does their job in a sick-of-this-bullshit, I’m-so-over-this kind of way, so really just get all the killing over with so we can hug and go home.
Legendary rapper, producer but not very convincing actor RZA is also in this flick. Why? Well, he was in the first one, so… Also Christopher Lloyd, legendary Doc Brown from the Back to the Future flicks, is also here. He doesn’t kill as many people this time, but he still kills some. I feel bad about people that old having to work for their daily bread, it makes me sad, but at least he’s out of the aged care facility. He’s not meeting new people or having new experiences, because killing fools is somehow something he’s still good at, but he’s getting out there, doing stuff, that’s good.
This whole flick had one touching moment for me. This isn’t exactly a flick you watch for dialogue or conversations or a script that does anything beyond the perfunctory, but there is one moment of grace for the whole flick. The main character’s son, who probably has a name, has been having trouble at school, fighting and such, and it’s implied it’s because Hutch / father figure hasn’t been around to model positive masculine manly role modelling for him. Of course, if he knew how many people his father had killed he’d probably think twice about following in his footsteps. But in the one instance where it looks like son will become father, he chooses not to, accepting the desperate plea of a henchman who begs for his own life.
It… was a strange moment, for me. In a flick that seems to delight in the usual American / fascist / self-actualisation idea that killing lots of people with guns is the be all and end all of the human experience, they allowed this one character not to kill someone, and then didn’t immediately undercut this act of mercy by having the guy instantly repay that kindness with murder or worse. Even nastier would have been a scene where the same henchman then kills or tries to kill his mother or sister, and then whoever actually killed the henchman would give him a stern glance or harsh word, indicating “real men kill everyone they can in the defence of home, hearth and family, even if the threat is imagined and something something illegal aliens are responsible”.
But no, they left the option that maybe the son doesn’t have to go into the murder business. I was gladdened by that, and maybe only that.
No doubt they’ll do a third one of these perfunctory flicks and the idea will be forgotten entirely.
It passed time, time that I feel like I don’t have. I could have spent it watching something better, something more meaningful, but you don’t know until after you’ve done it, and then it’s too late.
6 times Nobody really wants this and yet it keeps happening out of 10
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“After this vacation we need a vacation.” – ugh I mean are they even trying? - Nobody 2
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