Nobody starts out by introducing us to the hum-drum, excruciatingly ordinary life of, yes, an apparent nobody named Hutch Mansell, played wonderfully by Bob Odinkirk. Nothing much happens in this guy’s life. He’s got an unfulfilling job, a wife and kids who don’t seem to like him all that much, and a nice but modest sort of middle class suburban home. The central drama of his life involves domestic waste disposal. He keeps failing to roll out the trash bins in time, routinely getting the unwieldy things to the curb just a few seconds after the garbage truck has pulled away. Happens every damned time. And that’s about it for Hutch in the excitement department. We’re left to wonder how such a monochromatic drudge ever managed to snag himself such a gorgeous wife (portrayed by Connie Nielsen, who’s out of all of our leagues, we’re being honest).
Then a couple of punks break into his house in the middle of the night, and, well, things start happening, there’s a sort of chain reaction, while we in the audience follow the bouncing ball and begin to gather that Hutch here isn’t at all what he seems. Clearly, he’s got a back story that involves something a little more, ummm, intense than sitting behind a desk shuffling paper. But what? In one scene, a guy notices one of Hutch’s tattoos, blanches, and quietly exits the room through a steel-reinforced door, locking it behind him. Hunh. That’s gotta mean something, right? We’re still playing catch-up when Hutch has an entirely random but fateful encounter with a gang of sneering, despicable expat Russian thugs on public transit. These bastards think it’s great fun to harass a vulnerable and terrified young woman who’s sitting there all by herself. They obviously think she might be just the prey item to round out another carefree night of violent, soulless debauchery.
Hutch has other ideas.
One of the crappiest aspects of the generally crappy latter-day action movie genre is the complete absence of real-world physical consequences arising from even the most outlandishly violent actions. This tends to dumb down the narrative even when the protagonists aren’t stupid-looking super-heroes so decked out in plot armour that they couldn’t get hurt if you ran them through a combine harvester. In the movies, it’s also purportedly regular people, guys who might be tough, but aren’t named Thor, and don’t have skeletons forged out of adamantium or any such shit, who suffer only superficial injuries despite being assaulted with things that would immediately put an end to thee and me. They take bullets right through the sternum, yet never wind up with the logically inevitable sucking chest wounds. They get smacked upside the head with baseball bats, and instead of dropping like sacks of wet cement, they shake it off and come back for more. Nobody gets his teeth knocked out. Noses don’t break and bleed profusely. Eyes aren’t swollen shut. Nobody goes cross-eyed from a left hook that would have knocked a young George Foreman right into the middle of next week. They go at each other hammer and tongs in protracted bare-knuckle slugfests, and nobody so much as breaks a finger. Next scene, the guy who just got hit in the face with a dining room chair doesn’t have so much as a black eye.
Yeah. Nobody isn’t like that. In this movie, when you beat the living shit out of somebody, he subsequently looks and behaves as if somebody just beat him literally shitless. Nobody on that bus, save the woman whose peril serves as the catalyst for the entire bloody, bone-crunching, atavistic melee, gets out of the fight in one piece, not the scumbags, and not the hero either. It’s the ugliest, and God help me the most exhilarating, caveman fight I’ve ever seen on screen, and when it’s finally over, we know that somehow, prior to becoming a suburban drone, Hutch used to work for folks who sometimes found it convenient if certain vexatious people didn’t, you know, make it through to the next morning. Like Liam Neeson in the greatly inferior Taken franchise, Hutch is in possession of a particular set of skills.
At this point in the film, the bad guys don’t know what they’re up against. There aren’t a lot of movies that offer anything near so satisfying as watching the whole stupid lot of them fuck around and find out.
the needlefish 