“Nobody” is White Suburban Dad Revenge Porn, Minus all that Messy Moral Ambiguity
Nobody, the new film from Ilya Naishuller, is a serviceable action movie made noxious, thanks to the very flawed (and very American) logic that informs its plot. It begins with a correct premise — that the world is unfair — and gleefully proceeds to draw a horrifying conclusion: that the solution to that unfairness is violence. Admittedly, this is a worldview that’s implicit in many action movies, but in Nobody the moral ambiguity is thrown out the window like an underpaid stuntman. In other “revenge porn” films of the type (Taken or John Wick, for instance) the protagonist is at least presented as being reluctant to return to a former life of violence, relenting only when circumstances have forced his hand. In Nobody, Hutch Mansell (Bob Odenkirk) — a former military assassin turned meek suburban oldster — chooses to return to his murderous ways, ostensibly because he has suffered the indignity of a home invasion, but largely because — and as the film makes clear — he’s bored of a life that most Americans would kill for: a beautiful home in a good neighborhood, a steady job, a loving family. It’s an odd choice that puts the viewer in the unfortunate position of feeling sympathy for the movie’s villains, and contempt for its protagonist: this entire mess could have been avoided had Hutch simply decided not to murder someone on a bus with almost no provocation.
But Hutch’s pride is wounded, you see. After a quick-edit montage meant to drill home the fact that our hero is trapped in a miserable daily routine of public transit, office work, and domestic annoyances (welcome to Earth, dude) we turn quickly to a frightening home invasion at the Mansell residence, in which Hutch has an opportunity to protect his son and property by bludgeoning a pair of masked burglars to death with a golf club. At the last minute, he holds back — he knows they’re scared, and that the gun they’ve pulled on him is unloaded. The spooked burglars — who have at this point made the Wet Bandits look like Ocean’s Eleven — flee the scene with only a handful of cash, leaving Hutch’s son bruised but largely unhurt.
In the immediate aftermath of this harrowing event, cartoon versions of manhood appear to taunt Hutch, furthering his isolation and stoking his innate homicidal tendencies: a responding police officer implies that he should have done more; his dude-bro neighbor (replete with cool, manly hot-rod) expresses his wish that the burglars had come to his house instead, where he would have presumably reacted without a hint of fear, and gotten right to the business of murdering them sans hesitation. Even Hutch’s family cannot hide their disappointment at his perceived failing. His son gives him withering looks at the dinner table, his wife is bored with him, and even his sex life has turned fallow. Such is the sad life of a man without blood on his hands.
But never fear, Hutch has figured out a way to get his groove back: murder, of course! Just like the old days. But who to murder? Hutch dutifully tracks down the burglars, and considers killing them, but seeing that they have a baby (who is wearing an oxygen mask, making this fact extra poignant) he decides not to put a bullet in their skulls. Hutch, the film wants to remind us, is not a total maniac.
Or is he? On the bus ride home from this dramatic encounter, Hutch eyes a group of raucous goons, who waste no time in intimidating the cowering passengers. The implication is that this pack of testosterone-addled young men could break into violence at any second, but for the moment they engage in school-kid indignities like knocking books out of people’s hands and then standing on them when they attempt to pick them up. Nevertheless, this is all the justification Hutch needs to, as he declares, “fuck them up.” A grisly fight ensues — featuring broken bones, flying teeth, and even an emergency tracheotomy — before Hutch emerges victorious. Now baptized in the blood of his broken enemies, our hero is born again. He goes home to his family a new man —he plans vacations, smooches his wife, makes fancy lasagna dinners — the works. Truly, multiple homicides are the cure-all for the suburban dad trapped in a six-thousand square-foot house with no one to murder.
But as with most ill-conceived criminal acts, things soon get tangled. Hutch, it seems, has killed the wrong person, the brother of Russian crime lord Yulian Kuznetsov (Aleksey Serebryakov). Yulian — not unjustifiably — wants revenge, and proceeds to send his men to eliminate his brother’s killer. The rest of the film sees Hutch not so much taking on a small Russian army as effortlessly annihilating it, dispatching waves of Yulian’s hired thugs as quickly and safely as if he were frantically tapping the trigger button in a first-person shooter, and surviving near-death experiences as if he were Superman, instead of on the verge of an AARP membership. Seven armed assassins with automatic rifles are no match for an angry dad with a kitchen knife and a half-eaten plate of pasta, it seems. And roll-over car crashes? No problem, just grin and bear it — you’ll be fine.
If it wasn’t obvious enough by now, Nobody is indeed a fantasy — white suburban dad revenge porn. It’s also nothing particularly new — the “action-dad” micro-genre, in which some apparently docile middle-class male is revealed to be an ex-military, lion-in-a-polo badass, has existed for years. It’s a more specific flavor of the well-established action movie formula that so intimately ties masculinity to violence, and it’s custom-made for any poor guy currently in the throes of a mid-life crisis. It’s easy to eye-roll away (or even enjoy) such films, but as mentioned above, Nobody is especially pernicious in its bald view of violence as a panacea for society’s ills. It never once questions Hutch’s motivations, and any characters who might be expected to — his wife, his elderly dad — are instead encouraging, celebratory even. His father especially (played with stiff confusion by Christopher Llyod) inspires Hutch to follow his bloodthirsty bliss, wistfully longing for the days of what “he used to be” and even gets in on the action (sadly — Christopher Llyod mowing down people with a shotgun is not an image anyone needs in their life). All this amounts to a story that treats violence like a game, or a joke. Visceral fight sequences that would have shocked audiences with their brutality twenty-five years ago are presented here without emotion or consequence (societal checks on violence, like the police, don’t seem to exist in the film’s world). Nothing matters. Human bodies are things to be destroyed, and the more the merrier. Ho-hum.
What is the appeal of something like Nobody? There is, at the film’s core, a bitterness of a sort, and it’s a bitterness to which much of its audience might relate: one created by the sense that the American dream is a joke, by a vague feeling that we’re all being taken advantage of by “someone,” by a media-created worldview that instills fear of the “other” round-the-clock, and that recasts the nation as a warzone in which only the armed will survive. This forms a toxic stew in which fear mixes with a distrust of institutions, producing a nightmare world in which the actions of someone like Hutch Mansell aren’t insane, but necessary. Society itself is the enemy, the disease that can only be cured by the seductive lure of a quick pull of the trigger.
There is also the more personal boogeyman of aging, which, from a societal perspective, may hit white men hardest. To grow old in America is to grow irrelevant, and the action-dad genre of films like Nobody speak to this affronted mentality. To be a minority is not an easy thing, and to be old (at least for those white men not embalmed in positions of political or corporate power) is to suddenly become one. This is not an easy transition for those who once imagined they sat atop the food chain, and to wield the trappings of violence — whether guns, physical prowess, or “secret” knowledge — is to wield power, to win back the respect lost to time. To men like Hutch Mansell, there is no realization that power is a transitory thing, no deeper lesson learned that sooner or later we all find ourselves on the outside looking in — it is only a thing to be valued over all else, an unearned birthright that must never be relinquished, no matter what the cost to himself or others.
Nobody would seem uniquely poised to comment on themes of toxic masculinity, violence, and aging, but there’s nothing under the hood. At times its celebration of brutality was so fulsome that I was half-convinced I was witnessing a parody, which would have been better than what the filmmakers have actually given us. In the end, there is nothing in the movie deeper than a few simple (and simple-minded) ideas: violence is the best medicine. Regular life is boring. Respect is won at the point of a pistol, or with a kick to the ribs. Yes, Nobody is a dumb action movie and not a work of social commentary, and yes such films tend to pass the culture by without much thought or impact, but the moral angle it chooses to take is no less revolting because of that fact, and maybe even more so.
And then there’s the problem of Hutch Mansell himself. Anyone who’s seen him in Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul knows that Bob Odenkirk is an eminently likeable actor, but not here. Instead, he’s an amoral sad-sack killing machine who the film expects us to feel sympathy for, since (one supposes) he lives a life of quiet desperation, trapped in a circling drain of mediocrity, of staid domesticity. But who’s to blame for that? Early in the film, we witness multiple occasions of a livid Hutch failing to get his garbage out to the curb in time for pick-up, scenes meant to drive home the fact that he is a man trapped in a lifeless purgatory of banality: of feeding the kids, going to work, doing the chores. But it’s also revealing. Does it ever occur to Hutch to try changing his behavior? To, you know, put the garbage out the night before, say? Why not take some responsibility, accept that you might in fact be partly to blame for your own misery, and make a better life for yourself and your family, or at least a less stressful one?
Forget it, Nobody says, that would be dumb. Men aren’t made for chores — they’re made to hunt and fuck and break noses on city buses, if they must. It’s a silly view, something straight out of a sitcom or a teenage boy’s fantasy, but it’s no less dangerous for it.
