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 bringing to life 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.
Hutch grimaces and groans when he takes a punch, but always hits back much, much harder. That’s true again in “Nobody 2,” which essentially sticks to what worked in the first movie with a conspicuously bigger budget and a story line that amusingly evokes a “National Lampoon” family vacation gone brutally haywire. The key original cast is back — including Connie Nielsen as Mrs. Nobody — though there are more familiar faces here, among them John Ortiz as a local sheriff, Sharon Stone as a vamping villain and Colin Hanks as a bad guy I kept thinking of as Evil Tom Hanks. (Tom is Colin’s father.) This time, the original writer, Derek Kolstad (who created the John Wick series), shares credit with Aaron Rabin.
Directed by Timo Tjahjanto (taking over for Ilya Naishuller), “Nobody 2” again riffs on the comedy of the unlikely avenger. The other kink this time is that Hutch is now sweating and bleeding to pay off a debt to some evildoers, a burden that keeps him away from home and has left a trail of gruesomely disposed minions in his wake. Like many sequels, this one ramps up everything, including the body count. The fight sequences here are well-staged, shot and cut, more elaborate than in the earlier movie and at times gleefully grisly, with skewered and barbecued flesh. I didn’t especially appreciate the most sanguineous sections, though only because I sometimes shut my eyes when all I wanted to do was watch Odenkirk’s glorious, exceeding relatable farmisht countenance. He’s had his fill — who among us hasn’t?
Nobody 2
Rated R for extreme gun and sword violence. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. In theaters.
Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times.
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