- UK release: June 2021
- Director: Ilya Naishuller · Writer: Derek Kolstad
- Studio / distributor: 87North; Perfect World Pictures; Universal Pictures
- Genre: Action thriller / vigilante comedy · Runtime: 92 minutes (BBFC 15)
- Main cast: Bob Odenkirk (Better Call Saul, Breaking Bad) as Hutch Mansell; Aleksei Serebryakov (Leviathan) as Yulian Kuznetsov; Connie Nielsen (Gladiator) as Becca Mansell; Christopher Lloyd (Back to the Future, The Addams Family) as David Mansell
- Rotten Tomatoes: 84% critics / 94% audience · My rating: 8 / 10
Derek Kolstad wrote John Wick, David Leitch helped direct it, and the 87North stunt shop has spent the years since turning that one idea, a quiet man you really should not have wronged, into a house style. Nobody is that template handed to an unlikely owner. Instead of Keanu Reeves moving like a dancer, you get Bob Odenkirk, a man the world knows as a fast-talking lawyer and a sketch comedian, throwing and absorbing punches as if every one of them hurts. The casting is the joke and the hook at once, and it works far better than it has any right to.
The setup
Hutch Mansell is a study in beige. He commutes, he misses the bin lorry, he files numbers at his father-in-law’s metal works, and he has let his marriage cool to a polite truce. When two burglars break into his home one night, Hutch has them cornered and chooses, in front of his son, to let them walk rather than risk anyone getting hurt. It reads as cowardice. It eats at him. And when he goes looking for the pair to settle the matter on his own terms, he ends up on a night bus with a carful of drunken men and a young woman who needs help, and something he had carefully buried comes back up. The trouble is that one of the men he hurts is connected to a Russian crime boss, which turns a private reckoning into a siege.
The cast
Odenkirk carries the film, and the surprise is how completely he sells the violence without losing the sadness underneath it. He trained hard for this and you can see it, but the smarter choice is that Hutch is not invincible. He wins ugly, he gets hit, he looks his age, and the bus fight leaves him as wrecked as the men he takes apart. Connie Nielsen, who knows her way around a swords-and-sandals epic from Gladiator, is given less than she deserves as the wife watching a stranger surface in her husband, but she lands the wariness. Aleksei Serebryakov plays the antagonist Yulian as a vain, karaoke-loving sociopath, a nice tonal counterweight to the grey-man hero. The real treat is Christopher Lloyd as Hutch’s father, a retired man in a care home who turns out to have his own history and his own arsenal, and clearly relishes every second of it.
The craft
Ilya Naishuller made his name with the first-person shooter stunt of Hardcore Henry, and the surprise is how disciplined he is here. The action is legible. You can follow who is hitting whom and why, the geography of the bus and the factory finale always holds, and the camera sits back far enough to let the stunt work read. Pawel Pogorzelski shoots it in cold, handsome blues, and David Buckley’s score leans on needle-drops with a dry wit, including a use of old standards over carnage that the genre has used before but rarely this cleanly. At ninety-two minutes it does not outstay its welcome for a moment. It sets up its premise, pays it off, and gets out.
How it stacks up
The obvious relative is John Wick, and Nobody shares its DNA without trying to out-mythologise it: no Continental, no gold coins, just a man and a very bad week. Where it reaches for something richer it touches A History of Violence, Cronenberg’s study of a mild family man with a buried capacity for harm, though Nobody is far more interested in the fun of the unleashing than the moral hangover. It sits alongside Taken and The Equalizer as middle-aged-man-with-a-skill-set cinema, but it is wittier and more self-aware than either, happy to let you laugh at how absurd the escalation has become.
Critics versus the rest of us
The reception is warm, and rightly. Critics are sitting around 84%, with audiences notably higher at 94%, and the gap tells the story: this is a crowd-pleaser that critics enjoyed almost as much as the people who turned up for a Saturday-night action film. The recurring note is that it is John Wick with the serial numbers barely filed off, and that is fair. What stops it being a knock-off is the casting and the comic timing. Odenkirk’s everyman face does something Reeves’s stillness cannot, and the film knows it.
Verdict
This is exactly the kind of action film I keep coming back to: tight, funny, brutal, and gone before it can wear thin. It does nothing the genre has not done, but it does it with a hero you do not expect and a sense of humour about its own excess. The plot is a delivery system for set-pieces and makes no apology for it. I value rewatchability above almost anything in this corner of cinema, and this is a film I would happily put on again the moment the credits roll. It is not deep and it does not pretend to be. It is ninety-two minutes of clean, well-built, genuinely entertaining mayhem. 8⁄10.
Availability: In UK cinemas now. A digital and disc release will follow over the summer; on Universal’s home-entertainment slate for later in the year.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: Nobody did well enough to launch a franchise of its own, with a sequel following to push Hutch and his family into a second round. The first film has settled into its reputation as the best of the John Wick-adjacent spin-offs and the moment Bob Odenkirk arrived as a genuine action lead. It is now widely available on digital and disc, and streams on the usual platforms depending on your region.
BBFC content advice
Rated 15 by the BBFC for strong bloody violence, injury detail, language, threat, sex references. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Violence: Scenes of violence contain close-range gunfights and stabbings, resulting in bloody injuries. There are also explosions from booby traps, including two men who become impaled by metal rods.
Threat and horror: There is strong threat, including a scene in which a young woman is surrounded by a gang of drunken men on a deserted bus.
Language: There is strong language (‘fk’, ‘motherfker’), accompanied by milder terms, including ‘bitch’, ‘shit’, ‘asshole’, ‘God’, ‘hell’ and ‘damn’.
Sex: A scene contains photographs of a man in a gimp mask and bondage, accompanied by a woman wearing a g-string.
Injury detail: There are scenes containing strong injury detail, including the bloody aftermath of a man with lacerations on his face from cut glass, and another after being hit at close-range by an explosion. In one sequence, a man makes an incision into a man’s throat, then inserts a straw, allowing the man to breathe.
Additional issues: A black Russian man experiences some racial prejudice from other Russians, which is challenged. There is very brief drug misuse as a man snorts something off the back of his hand.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
