This is the latest Movie Beginning With The Letter “N” In Which Bob Odenkirk Gets Kicked Around A Lot. The two most recent other ones are “Nobody” and “Nobody 2.” Does 2013’s “Nebraska,” in which Odenkirk played a son neglected by dad Bruce Dern, count? Depends on how bad you think his character had it, I guess.
In any event, the premise of both “Nobody” pictures was that Odenkirk played an Ordinary Guy in an Ordinary Suburb who just happened to have a past as a U.S. government assassin. And so in these pictures, that past would catch up with him and he’d be obliged to reveal his Extraordinary Killing Skills.
In “Normal,” whose story was co-written by Odenkirk, things are a little different. Ulysses, Odenkirk’s character, really is an ordinary guy, and he’s hoping that his temporary assignment in Normal, Minnesota, will be an uneventful one. The audience knows that it will not, however, because in a Tokyo-set prologue, we witness a couple of Yakuza in a face-saving finger-chopping ritual which ends with one of the fellows being told he’s to be exiled to, well, Normal, Minnesota.
As Ulysses makes his rounds, he finds the townsfolk to be friendly if a little guarded. He doesn’t mind; a tragedy in his past has left him with the conviction that “life’s a lot easier when you care a little less.” Soon, a blizzard comes to town, as do two haplessly poor folks who think it might be a bright idea to rob Normal’s bank. And these hapless folks discover that the population of the town is unusually protective of that bank. How Sheriff Ulysses finds himself protecting the bank robbers rather than the townsfolk is something you’d probably prefer to learn from this ruthlessly entertaining movie rather than from a review of it, and I commend you to that.
One presumes it was at least partially co-producer Odenkirk’s idea to hire Ben Wheatley to direct the eventually quite mayhem-heavy proceedings. Wheatley’s got a line in gonzo action thrillers, from 2011’s macabre “Kill List” to the folk-horror blast “A Field In England” (2013)to the in-your-face Ballard adaptation “High Rise” (2015) to the head-spinning shoot-em-up “Free Fire” (2016). After steering into less comfortable territory like a reboot of “Rebecca” and a Giant Shark Movie, he’s on more welcoming ground with this territory, in which greed makes ordinary folk into homicidal rampagers. One of whom exclaims, “I do know what I signed up for, but geez, I didn’t think I’d actually have to do it.” That’s after this character loses an ear, but before a brace of Yakuza drops into town. (One amusing story point is the revelation that one of the bank guards is a Japanese guy who’s missing the top joint of his pinky.)
The violence is pretty graphic, and some of it is played for laughs, which would be distasteful if the laughs didn’t actually land. Oh well. Sometimes you enjoy a movie, and you don’t feel good about it in the morning.
