There’s no stopping the violently raging dad, including in the movies. A familiar type and late-career booster for some actors (see: Liam Neeson), the raging dad skews hellish or heroic, often both. His violence can be as righteous as Abraham’s or whatever it needs to be as long as it burns slow enough to fuel a story until it explodes with consuming intensity. The raging dad can also be funny, though it helps if he’s played by Bob Odenkirk, an irresistibly watchable performer with a talent for playing outwardly ordinary, preternaturally put-upon guys who always seem to be working some kind of angle behind their all-seeing eyes.
There’s a lot going on behind Odenkirk’s Mr. Average persona in “Nobody 2,” a diverting sequel to the 2021 action thriller “Nobody,” in which he played a seemingly typical suburban family man — Hutch, a self-identified nobody — who’s also an assassin and adept with any weapon, his fists included. Hutch has the usual complicated past and similarly skilled relatives, namely his brother, Harry (RZA), and their cackling, cigar-chewing father, David (the delightful Christopher Lloyd), an ex-F.B.I. agent. Hutch once worked for American intelligence, though now lives a picture-perfect dull life, its quiet desperation largely emblematized by his reliable inability to roll the family garbage bin out in time for the truck.
One beauty, as it were, of “Nobody” is that it seemed to come out of nowhere, partly because it opened during the Covid pandemic in March 2021, the month that many American theaters began reopening. It was soon available to watch at home, so if you stumbled across it like I did, it felt like a discovery. A nimble, fairly bare-bones action movie that mixes laughs with explosive violence, it hinges on Odenkirk’s unlikely hero, who seems like a classic Walter Mitty fantasist but fights with the lethal, practiced skill of John Wick. “Nobody” didn’t deviate far from the action template, but it has offbeat humor, appealing performers and some tight, wittily choreographed fight sequences that made smart use of Odenkirk’s comedy chops.
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