Movie Review: Nobody

The start of the new movie “Nobody” shows a collage of the main character Hutch Mansell, played by Bob Odenkirk – getting up in the morning, drinking coffee, forgetting to put out the garbage, running after the garbage truck, sitting in a boring and depressing office inside of a rundown factory while living a typical, mundane and at times an infuriating life of a middle aged man in the United States. We all often wonder where all the time goes, with so many of us in the world, because of the money, living the same typical days hundreds and thousands of times over. This collage showed better than any other movie that I have seen, the reality of life and making a living for so many millions of us.

As this story continues Hutch Mansell’s family are robbed at gunpoint in their home and despite Mansell’s previous special ops training, he does not take any action against the two armed robbers, who we later learn are husband and wife – poor and desperate trying to raise an infant child.

Over time, Mansell’s regret over doing nothing (despite the fact that given this robbery his lack of action was the best choice) – starts to eat at him, and his boring meaningless job make his anger grow to a fever pitch. Eventually Hutch takes action and he becomes a vigilante starting with some amazingly well filmed violence on a bus against 5 other guys. Odenkirk certainly does not have the size or physique to be an action star, but throughout this entire movie, he pulls off some very well done fight scenes.

One of the best messages of the film is the great way it shows the slow burn that all of us have inside of us, until we eventually break, until we cannot take it anymore – a great line from “Network”, 1976. In some cases some of us arrive at an irrational point that can be at times, even out of proportion to the outrage we have experienced. The expression, “going postal” also comes to mind in many extreme cases have all heard about in the news.

The acting in this movie is all outstanding, starting with Odenkirk, Connie Neilson, who plays Mansell’s wife, Aleksey Serebryakov who almost steals this movie as an insane Russian mobster and 82 year old Christopher Lloyd who is great as Mansell’s father who lives in a nursing home, but never forgot his hand to hand combat skills.

I agree with the high ratings of 80% for Nobody on Rotten Tomatoes, my rating is closer to 85% – and I highly recommend this movie.