Nobody took the world by storm four or so years ago. It was an action film by one of the best action directors in Hollywood, David Leitch. The thing is, after he came on the scene with a bang with John Wick, people knew about him being an action director. What they didn’t know much about was his latest little action film, Nobody. Add to that it starred an aging drama actor from Breaking Bad & Better Call Saul, Bob Odenkirk. Who isn’t an action star by any stretch of the imagination. It did so well with audiences that Leitch is now gone, and Timo Tjahjanto has stepped in to team up with Odenkirk for a sequel, Nobody 2. The problem is that it’s not as good as the original, and the cookie-cutter formula it uses was already used to great success in the first movie.That’s not a good thing for this sequel trying to capture the magic of the first movie.

Hutch Manzell (Bob Odenkirk) is now indebted to the government after they helped him pay his debt from the previous film. He’s now doing covert missions to them. After doing a mission, he requests time with his family on vacation. He decides to take them, his wife Becca (Connie Nielsen), his son Brady (Gage Munroe), his daughter Sammy (Paisley Cadorath) and his father (Christopher Loyd) to an old vacation spot in Wisconsin where he and his brother Harry (RZA) visited when they were kids with their father, Plummerville. To an amusement park there. The problem is things don’t exactly go as he planned. He ends up embroiled in a situation with the law and some sinister characters he shouldn’t have messed with. That’s Hutch’s style, though.

Tjahjanto combines two distinct genres with this movie, comedy and action. These two genres have been combined together before with great effects many times. This time, unfortunately, they weren’t combined very well. The first film was an original idea with a little bit of suspension of disbelief added in to get viewers behind it. This one is just a cookie-cutter version of that movie. All the way down to the framing device the first film used. Just because something worked once doesn’t mean you have to copy the exact formula and make the same movie with a few minor differences. You’d think the creator of the character and writer, Derek Kolstad, would come up with something more original than this movie. This was a big disappointment because it had so much potential and failed to even come close to the original film in any way.

Yes, there was some comedy that made people in my screening laugh, but it was far and in-between. The action was the best part of the movie as it was in the original, but it wasn’t enough for me to love this action sequel like I wished I had. There were three major action sequences that brought the vibe of the original film. Those being a fight sequence on an elevator, a boat and the end of the movie action scene.These were very well choreographed by the same man who worked on the John Wick films and both of these movies, Daniel Bernhardt. He played different characters in both Nobody films. His real trade is stunt coordination and choreography. These scenes were well thought out and executed in this action sequel. It’s the best part of the movie as you’d imagine with who’s involved behind the scenes. These moments caused me to cringe and laugh. That’s the extent of my enjoyment of this film, though.

Besides the cast members, I have already mentioned, there are a handful more that play key parts in this film. Colin Hanks plays a town sheriff who works for a sinister woman, Lendina (Sharon Stone). She is a nasty piece of work who shoots her own men for doing something wrong. Stone hasn’t been seen much in films lately, but she really went for it in this film as this crazy woman.  Another key character is Henry, played by John Ortiz. He is a man who also works for the Stone character but finds himself in a tough spot as she goes back on their agreement, and somebody he loves is threatened by her and the Hanks character. Ortiz is a good character actor, and I love seeing him pop up in movies. I liked him not obviously being a predictable character in the story, though. This was a surprising supporting cast. I have to say. They were okay in the movie, but a couple of them were a bit over the top.

The concept of this story was that the main character takes his family on vacation. I know it’s a beloved spot by the Odenkirk character, but really, this is where they go?  I mean, come on. Why wouldn’t he take them to Hawaii or Florida or somewhere tropical and beautiful. Why would Kolstad write this into his story? This seemed to me like nobody,  no pun intended, would go here on vacation. The marketing seemed to allude to a different place, but maybe that was on purpose. Who knows? I sure as hell wouldn’t go to this place if I were going on vacation. Even though I did go to Wisconsin to visit my sister a while back. There had to be a reason he wrote this into the script. I don’t know why, though. It doesn’t make sense to me. That was a bad aspect of this story for me, honestly.

I’m a fan of Bob Odenkirk. He has done some great work on the television shows I mentioned earlier in this review. He even surprised me by how much I liked him in the original Nobody. He was a bit out of his league here with this sequel that went in a bad direction. He tries to do the best he can, but even he can’t save this terrible sequel. It seems like he was just going through the paces this time around. He probably just wanted that paycheck again. Sometimes actors do that, unfortunately. It’s a shame he could have been involved with a better movie, that’s all. Hopefully, he gets some much better scripts in the future.

 Nobody 2 is a misguided sequel that didn’t have enough going for it for me to recommend it to audiences.  It is a copy of the original movie. Not in a good way. It repeats so many of the good things from the first film but doesn’t do them as well. Right down to the framing sequence at the beginning and end of the movies. Instead of coming up with an original concept, the creator and writer Kolstad decided to go the easy route by making an almost exact replica of the last film. That’s lazy as far as I’m concerned. The cast is okay, but not great. Some of them I was very surprised to see pop up, though. Odenkirk did the best he could, considering how hamstrung he was with the story. The action scenes were the best part of this movie. With the people involved behind the scenes, it makes sense that the action scenes and fight sequences were so good. They weren’t enough to save the movie for me, though. Overall, this was a very disappointing action/comedy sequel.

1 star

Dan Skip Allen