In the Flesh: Nobody (Patreon)

The dad fantasy is well-trod cinematic territory. You’ve got Taken, in which Liam Neeson lives out your shitty uncle’s fantasies of shooting foreigners for menacing his daughter; Breakdown, in which an office drone gets to prove to his wife that he’s actually a sweaty hunk; Diehard, in which John McClane convinces his wife that even though she’s the breadwinner he’s still the Man. On and on it goes until we arrive in 2021 at Ilya Naishuller’s Nobody, a movie about how if his family would just get the hell out of his way, maybe dad could return to his natural state: being a badass. It’s not a bad movie, per se. On its own terms it’s a mostly enjoyable action flick, the final act especially, with some thin, repetitive writing and shopworn characters. RZA shows up as our hero Hutch’s (Bob Odenkirk) reclusive adoptive brother, Christopher Lloyd is wonderfully game in a deeply boring role as the brothers’ aged but still deadly father, and the rest of the cast is more or less interchangeable.

There’s a lazily slick quality to the film’s production, the colors saturated but unadventurous, the sets and costuming for the most part coldly impersonal (Yulian’s snakeskin ensemble is a welcome exception). Naishuller deploys fisheye shots and other techniques without apparent reason, rendering workaday interiors muddy and exterior shots oddly tilted away from the viewer. The action is more or less comprehensible, especially in the film’s two standout sequences — a fun, frenetic car chase staged with admirable restraint and a vicious slugfest between Hutch and a bus full of drunken hoods — and Naishuller has a good sense for the simple kinetic payoff of watching the inevitable unfold. A hydraulic press popping the pin out of a grenade, a claymore mine attached to an improvised shield made of bulletproof glass, the pull string stretched around the edge and its ring gripped in Hutch’s teeth. It’s satisfying stuff.

Nobody isn’t much, its antipathy toward the supposed constraints binding masculinity neither virulent nor self-aware enough to be interesting, its all-hits-all-the-time soundtrack covering for the film’s overall lack of imagination rather than elevating what’s happening on screen. What a Wonderful World, Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood, Heartbreaker, The Impossible Dream, and Let the Good Times Roll work, obviously, the Man of La Mancha song best and most uniquely as a karaoke number by the flamboyant Yulian, but when the movie turns to Russian electro-pop and other stateside obscurities it has a chance to breathe as its own thing, to develop a mood it isn’t cribbing from a best-of album. It’s a perfectly okay flick, unexceptional and largely entertaining, but it just doesn’t have the legs or the brains it would take to be anything more than that.