Odenkirk is your mild-mannered average man in suburbia. His name is Hutch and he has an average job as a construction office worker in his father-in-law's company. He takes the bus to work everyday, forgets to take out the trash every Wednesday, is married and has two children. Nothing out of the ordinary until their house is burglarized and, though Hutch is armed with a golf club, he doesn't use it and lets the burglars go with some cash and his daughter's favorite bracelet. Everyone from his family to his co-workers to even the police ask him why he didn't fight back and protect his son who was wrestling with one masked burglar. Hutch has his reasons but he is no nobody. It turns out he is a former deadly government assassin who chose to have a normal life. The backstory is somewhat interesting enough to wish there were more character details, but who has time for that when Hutch has to prove he is not a nobody.
As I said, "Nobody" seems to be headed in the character study direction at first, especially after finding those two masked burglars. Without divulging too much, Hutch is struck by guilt after discovering their plight (let's say the health care system gets a slight beating in this film). When riding a bus back home, some Russian thugs enter the bus and force all the passengers out, and Hutch decides to beat them and stab them! Lo and behold, one of them is the brother of a Russian karaoke singer and mob higher-up Yulian (Aleksey Serebryakov). This mobster is so impulsively violent that he thinks nothing of slicing a guy's neck open in front of everyone at a club! It at this point where I realized that character study is not this movie's motivation. Hutch practically shoots every single thug working for Yulian imaginable and in imaginative ways (love the use of the fire extinguisher) - Hutch is a one-man army. The switch in the narrative feels abrupt and all we can do is sit back and watch Hutch protect his family from these thugs.
"Nobody" doesn't aim any higher than being a professional piece of giddy action movie sequences and shootouts galore (Director Ilya Naishuller does a bang-up job). Most of it works because nuanced Odenkirk is at the center of the action, and we believe what he's doing every step of the way since he does a good job of showing a relatively normal human being with an unbelievable past. The villains are a little over-the-top and Hutch's family (including the underused Connie Nielsen as his wife) don't resonate in the mind after the film is over. At least Christopher Lloyd as Hutch's dad has a colorfully entertaining extended cameo. Still, for Bob Odenkirk, the kinetic action and some supporting roles, "Nobody" is definitely worth anybody's time.
