Although the year is not yet half over, one of the best action films of the year seems to have emerged. It’s called ‘nobody’ and stars Bob Odenkirk, known for his work on ‘The Sassy Lawyer’, and writer Derek Costa and the visual effects team, all of whom were on the original cast of ‘Fast and Furious’.
It’s a fist-pumping, head-banging film that you don’t need to think about logic when you watch it, it’s just good enough. After all, cool movies are not about storytelling, let alone plausibility, but only about raw desire, and what you can’t experience in real life, you can achieve with a movie. So ‘nobody’ is like getting high, stabbing you in the face with the ultimate pleasure, the kind of pleasure that is simply the happiest thing in life.
As we all know, there are three major things not to mess with in Hollywood. Keanu Reeves’ dog, the mob killed his dog in Fast and Furious 1 and he destroyed the whole mob. Liam Neeson’s daughter, whose daughter was kidnapped on a trip in Hurricane Rescue 1 and he went across the world to break up the kidnapping ring. Denzel Washington’s friend, a girl he occasionally bumped into in a restaurant was bullied in The Wrong Man 1, and the ruthless man went straight to exterminating a gang.
However, after NOBODY, I’m afraid I’ll have to add one more that can’t be messed with. Bob Odenkirk’s daughter’s cat bracelet can’t be stolen or she’ll have to suffer the consequences of missing her arm and head. Hatch is an older man who is having a mid-life crisis. He lives his life like a running account, waking up early to run, waiting for the bus, clocking in and facing forms at work, working out after work and coming home to a wife who dislikes him.
In the eyes of outsiders, this middle-aged man is useless, without a trace of masculinity, and his life has no half-hearted ups and downs, as if he will remain mediocre for the rest of his life. But a pair of male and female burglars change that. Hatch was staring at the house with his eyes wide open when he heard a noise downstairs, and when he heard it, a man and a woman sneaked in under his nose. When his son saw this, he darted in and put the male thieves in a chokehold, at which point Hatch could have caught them alive with a flick of the golf club in his hand.
However, he has compassion and lets the thieves take the money and the watch, to the dismay of the crowd, the son’s foul mouth, the police’s confusion, the neighbours’ derision and the brother-in-law’s gift of a pistol. Hatch seems to have expected this outcome and is unconcerned by their words and behaviour. And little did they know that Hatch was not as incompetent as he appeared to be; he refrained from doing anything because he saw that the pair of thieves were novices and that the gun was unloaded.
Life is quiet again until his daughter’s cat bracelet goes missing and a top killer who is coy in the home and heavy-handed in the face of his enemies comes out of the woodwork. Hatch drew the pair of tattoos on the thief’s arms from memory, then took his father’s revolver and FBI agent ID. He went to every tattoo parlour down the street looking for clues and finally learned the address of the female and male thieves. Without saying a word, Hatch rushed up and punched them, pointing his gun at their heads.
The thief explained that he hadn’t seen the bracelet. Hatch didn’t listen to their nonsense and tried to shoot them, but a crying child disrupted his plans and his love for his family made him let the pair go. But the anger he was holding on to had to go out, and it just so happened that five unsuspecting drunken young men had caused trouble. They stopped the bus Hatch was on, got on, teased and insulted him, and Hatch asked the others to get off, leaving him and the five of them on the bus.
Hatch pulled out a pistol, reloaded it in front of them and said “I’m going to kill you all”, followed by a twenty-year punch that sent them to the ground. One of the young men died of his wounds, the brother of the Russian gangster Yulian, and a head-to-head fight between the little man and the big man took place. Yulian asks the female hacker in the gang to look up Hatch’s background.
Sent over from the Pentagon, Hatch looks flat, with identifying information obscured by black lines next to bloodied photos, but the information is terrifyingly overwhelming. The hacker quickly packed up her belongings, dumped the file on Yulian and left with the words “I’m out, and I don’t need to pay you”.
Yulian had seen a lot of things, so he was not intimidated by the hacker’s actions. He arranged for his right-hand man, a black Russian, to lead a group of thugs to Hatch’s home to kill his entire family to avenge his brother’s death. Hatch sent his family into the basement and fought them off on his own. Although he had no trouble resisting the enemy on his own, he was unable to resist the black men behind him.
After Hatch was electrocuted, the black Russians threw him into the trunk. What they didn’t expect was that Hatch was a tough guy and broke his thumb to get out of the handcuffs. A kick to the back of the rear seat backrest and a blow with a fire extinguisher as a weapon, followed by the destruction of the car, led to the obvious result that Hatch escaped death and even managed to run home with a strut and a hot bath.
Having ended the passive retaliation, Hatch took the initiative and First, he kept his backyard from catching fire, sent his family to safety just in case, and set fire to his own house, reducing it to ashes, along with the bodies of the minions. Then it was straight into the tiger’s den, one man taking on the entire mob.
As is the usual rule, Hatch started with a wave of taunts and salutes, and armed with an assortment of weapons, he broke into Yulian’s bank, showing no mercy to those underlings. A few bullets flew by, a few grenades washed the floor, and their bodies lay strewn across the bank floor as Hatch dashed through with a painting clutched in his hand.
He picked up a pile of dollars on the floor, set it alight and tossed it along, and as the flames swept by, hundreds of millions of dollars crackled not far away, the sound of money burning. And that’s not all. After all this, Hatch appeared blandly at Yulian’s nightclub. He was sitting in the middle of the room, drinking wine, eating steak and listening to Yulian sing on stage, with the air of a man who has never changed.
When he was confronted with this provocation, Yulian, as a gangster, couldn’t afford to lose face. He slammed the door and Hatch started his sports car, chasing them down to the factory he had remodelled and set up. A fierce gun battle ensued and Hatch ran out of ammunition, so he planted a bomb on the bulletproof glass and charged out like a shield.
Afterwards, the police arrested him and asked him who he was, to which Hatch replied, “I’m just a little man.” Just as the police are indignant at this negative attitude, a phone call is received and, although the content of the call is not revealed, Hatch is released without charge. The hint at the end, although it also does not reveal Hatch’s identity, is left blank and makes one look forward to the second film, which will expand the universe of the Fast and Furious series.
Nobody is similar in formula to Fast and Furious, in that it’s an action-packed thriller. There are two action-packed scenes in ‘nobody’, one a bus battle and the other a factory melee, from fist to fist to gun to gun.
In the bus stop, the director cleverly uses the small space to arrange a close fight. The main character, Hatch, doesn’t fight in an ethereal or aesthetic way, but he is practical and powerful, and his punches and kicks hit the nail on the head and poke his opponent right in the joints. Like Jackie Chan, he uses everything around him as a weapon – handrail poles, school bag straps, wine bottles – and picks them up and smashes them over the head, with viciousness, speed and precision. The camera work, the editing, and the searing pacing make this a Hong Kong-style action film that gets the adrenaline pumping.
The factory melee is another style. Having seen the over-the-top bare-knuckle fights, it’s natural not to miss the bullet-filled rampages that are no less impressive. Hatch doesn’t mindlessly attack with a gun, but judges it based on the actual situation, such as using a pistol plus unarmed combat at close range, which is faster and more convenient. At long range, he uses shotguns and submachine guns to strafe, and in turn point-blank shots to fight people, with the lower three ways being the best means of getting the better of the enemy, and the film doesn’t shy away from this in any way.
Hatch makes the most of his surroundings and the situation he is in to respond accordingly, such as adjusting his organs, keeping a backhand, and sneaking up on people in the dark. As for the plot part, it is no longer relevant.
After all, “Nobody” is a traditional Hollywood-style individual heroic film, where you need a proper reason to watch a hero kill his enemies.
