Nobody 2: Escapist wretched excess

Nobody 2 (2025) • View trailer

Three stars (out of five). Rated R, for relentless profanity and strong, bloody violence

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 8.17.25 

This is the guiltiest of guilty pleasures.

 

Director Timo Tjahjanto’s deplorably violent thriller is palatable solely because of the macabre dark humor in Derek Kolstad and Aaron Rabin’s crazy script, and the hilariously stoic performance by star Bob Odenkirk.

 

Four men get into an elevator, followed by the apparently mild-mannered Hutch Mansell
(Bob Odenkirk, center). How many will survive the trip?

The result is so excessively outrageous, that you can’t help laughing ... although you’ll likely feel guilty for having done so, when later describing this film to more conservative friends.

In this film’s 2021 predecessor, Hutch Mansell (Odenkirk) was introduced as a mundane office worker whose bland life concealed the fact that he was a former “auditor” (assassin) employed by the U.S. Intelligence Community. His ordinary existence — alongside emotionally starved wife Becca (Connie Nielsen), teenage son Brady (Gage Munroe) and adolescent daughter Sammy (Paisley Cadorath) — was interrupted by “events beyond his control.” In the aftermath, he and his family began anew.

 

Except not really, as this sequel quickly makes clear. A fleeting prologue, mimicking an identical scene in the earlier film, finds a bruised and badly damaged Hutch being interrogated by FBI agents ... this time alongside a large dog with a soulful gaze.

 

One bewildered agent asks, “Who are you?,” prompting Hutch to respond via a long flashback.

 

Things having gone very wrong during the intervening years, Hutch now spends his days “processing” assignments for “The Barber” (Colin Salmon), his former government handler. Hutch is slowly working off a $30 million debt incurred when he earlier destroyed the Russian Mob’s cash reserve.

 

Sadly, the constant daily grind — skirmishes, fights, all-out melees — have taken a toll on Hutch’s marriage and home life. He barely sees his wife and children, and Becca — fully aware of what he does, although this is kept from their children — flirts with the notion of leaving him.

 

Hutch isn’t blind; he recognizes the need to make amends. He therefore proposes a vacation to Wild Bill’s Majestic Midway and Waterpark, a family-friendly theme park in nearby Plummerville. It was the one and only place where Hutch and his brother Harry went on vacation as kids. In short, it’s one of Hutch’s few happy childhood memories.

 

(Filming actually took place in Winnipeg, Manitoba; production designer Michael Diner was inspired by classic Midwestern Americana burgs like the Wisconsin Dells, where Odenkirk’s family vacationed when he was a kid.)

 

The Barber tolerates this brief respite, albeit with a warning: “Wherever you go, you’ll be you.”

 

Meaning, Hutch can’t help finding trouble that needs to be extinguished.

Mortal Engines: High-octane thrills

Mortal Engines (2018) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG-13 for dramatic intensity and sci-fi action and violence
By Derrick Bang

This one’s relentless.

Director Christian Rivers’ exhilarating adaptation of Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines is sci-fi world-building on a scale we’ve not seen since Lord of the Rings and Avatar. This impressively ambitious, post-apocalyptic saga hits the ground running — literally — and doesn’t let up during a bravura 127-minute adventure that barely seems long enough to contain its opulent wonders.

Out of the frying pan, and into the fire? Tom (Robert Sheehan) and Hester (Hera Hilmar,
right) are moments from a fate worse than death, when they're snatched away by the
enigmatic Anna Fang (Jihae). But is this a rescue ... or something more sinister?

Scripters Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and Peter Jackson have done an impressive job of condensing Reeve’s 2001 young adult novel into a slam-bang romp that faithfully follows roughly half the book and hits most of the key plot beats. (That said, Walsh & Co. deviate seriously during the climax, likely in the interest of anticipating a sequel.)

These events take place a millennium after what has come to be known as the “Sixty Minute War,” when Western nations unleashed a cataclysmic weapon that destroyed much of civilization, while causing planet-wide geological upheaval. Forced to adapt to earthquakes, volcanoes and other instabilities that continued for hundreds of years, metropolitan centers were retrofitted with massive wheels and engines, in order to become mobile “traction cities”: a steampunk method of survival known as Municipal Darwinism.

Countries have vanished; civilization per se has developed into cooperative bands of peaceful small-town traders, constantly on the alert for fast-moving, scavenger settlements.

Along with the biggest threat of all: the massive predator city of London, which hunts, pursues and dismantles (devours) other cities for resources.

All this by way of back-story, because Rivers opens the film without preamble, as the massive bulk of London chases down a small mining community known as Salthook. Production designer Dan Hennah, cinematographer Simon Raby and a huge visual effects team — Ken McGaugh, Kevin Smith, Luke Millar and Dennis Yoo, take a well-deserved bow — swoop the camera in, around and through London’s jaw-dropping hugeness and complexity, layered with bits and bobs clearly snatched from countless earlier captures.

It’s an absolutely amazing, stunning sequence, particularly as many of London’s thousands of residents gather at their city’s layered edges, cheering the pursuit with the bloodthirsty savagery of heartless nationalists (an allusion to current real-world behavior, in which this film frequently indulges).

Salthook has maneuverability and quick turns in its favor, but it can’t compete with London’s stronger engines. The outcome is inevitable, with one of the smaller community’s residents — a young woman with a red scarf concealing part of her face — watching with (we’re surprised) what appears to be mixed feelings.

London Has Fallen: Xenophobic propaganda

London Has Fallen (2016) • View trailer 
2.5 stars. Rated R, for relentless violence and profanity
By Derrick Bang

Aaron Eckhart’s Benjamin Asher surely is the unluckiest U.S. President in cinema history.

Bad enough that he only narrowly survived being held hostage by North Korean terrorists, in 2013’s deplorably violent and inexcusably jingoistic Olympus Has Fallen. Now, drawn to London to attend the state funeral of the British Prime Minister, President Asher finds himself targeted — along with half a dozen other Western European heads of state — by a lethal arms dealer who also is one of the world’s most wanted criminals.

When their helicopter is shot down by rooftop terrorists armed with Stinger missiles, ace
Secret Service agent Mike Banning (Gerard Butler, right) is the only man left to protect
U.S. President Benjamin Asher (Aaron Eckhart) from hoards of gun-toting thugs.

Fortunately, in both cases, ace Secret Service Agent Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) is on hand to save the day.

For the most part, director Babak Najafi’s London Has Fallen is the sort of bullet-laden action thriller that generally goes straight to late-night time slots on Cinemax and lesser cable/satellite movie channels. The plot is predictably silly, the good guys utterly indestructible — aside from those dispatched as sacrificial lambs — and the bad guys thoroughly reprehensible.

The difference, as was the case with this series’ first entry, is that London Has Fallen boasts a better-than-average cast, with Butler and Eckhart supported by Morgan Freeman, Angela Bassett and numerous other solid character actors. But even good actors can’t do much with dumb scripts, a grim premise and vapid execution.

Najafi brings nothing to the party. His camera set-ups are humdrum, and he hasn’t the faintest idea how to build suspense. This is little more than run and shoot, run and shoot.

The (modestly) good news is that this new film isn’t quite as offensively pugnacious as its predecessor, which was scripted solely by Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt. They’re assisted this time by co-writers Christian Gudegast and Chad St. John, although I can’t imagine why four people were required to write such a simplistic, comic book plot.

On top of which, the flag-waving, gung-ho patriotism that Rothenberger and Benedikt established in Olympus is just as evident here, and perhaps even more so. Films of this nature are an embarrassment, with their suggestion that brave and resourceful Americans — and only Americans — are the one thing preventing maddened terrorists from invading and controlling the entire free world.

Which is to say, this script is offensively cavalier with its treatment of government officials — and their colleagues — from France, Italy, Germany, Japan and elsewhere. I guess the British should feel lucky that they get to help Banning. A little.