NOBODY 2 - Mark Reviews Movies

Nobody 2, Universal Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 14, 2025

Bob Odenkirk established himself so well as an unlikely action hero in Nobody that the sequel doesn't have to bother setting up much of anything except the plot. Indeed, Nobody 2 is even more streamlined than the concise original, which is something of a surprise. After watching some major action-movie franchises become bogged down by their back story and elaborate lore, the filmmakers here take another path.

This story is as simple as simple can be, really. Odenkirk's Hutch, the assassin who was hiding his past and trying to live a mundane suburban family life, has returned to killing people for money. That's because he must, though, since he owes a debt to "the Barber" (Colin Salmon) and, presumably, some secret government agency, who covered the cost of all the Russian mob money he set ablaze in the previous film.

Director Timo Tjahjanto, taking over for the sequel, repeats the same opening beats of the first film here, from a flash-forward interrogation of a bruised and bloody Hutch, who cauterizes a wound with the heat of a lighter, to a montage of the man's weekly routine. This time, Hutch is mostly absent from home and his family life, since he has to kill people to repay the debt. That leaves his wife Becca (Connie Nielsen) alone at the dinner table waiting for him, while his kids, Brady (Gage Munroe) and Sammy (Paisley Cadorath), have become accustomed to their father's absence.

This cannot stand for Hutch, who knows his wife resents his regularly late hours and that he's missing out on his children growing up, as well as the fact that his son seems to be getting into fights at and outside school. The situation calls for a family vacation, and Hutch can only think of one place: the tourist-trap town of Plummerville, where his own father David (Christopher Lloyd), who tags along, took him on the only vacation he ever had as a kid.

The idea of Plummerville, by the way, will be instantaneously recognizable to denizens of the Midwest. With its Main Street-style shops and its central amusement/water park attraction, the place is basically a low-rent Wisconsin Dells, completing the downgrade with second-rate "duck boats" that aren't the amphibious military vehicles Hutch remembers from his youth. Instead, they're just ordinary boats with a plastic duck atop each one.

The important thing, of course, is that the location serves as a place where Hutch can get into plenty of fights, shootouts, and other chaotic mayhem. The setup for that is incredibly simple and reminds us why Odenkirk's casting, completely against type at the time, was so vital to the first film's success.

Hutch brings Becca and the kids to a local arcade, where Brady is bullied by some local teens and a responding security guard smacks Sammy upside the back of her completely innocent head. Obviously, Hutch wants to stay out of and away from trouble while on vacation, but we can see the phony façade of his Midwestern politeness drop and the instinct to do something about this offense to his daughter emerge.

Odenkirk might have seemed an odd choice to be an action hero in the first film, which part of the reason why the performance was so engaging, but he was so effective that Tjahjanto can give us these little shortcuts into the action. We know what's coming as soon as that calculating look appears on Hutch's face.

The resulting plot is more of the usual, both in terms of what was in the previous film and these sorts of movies in general. Hutch's arcade mayhem, using the games as weapons in very funny ways, gets on the wrong side of several locally powerful people.

They include theme park owner Henry (John Ortiz), local Sheriff Abel (Colin Hanks), and, above all of those folks and their goons, Lendina (Sharon Stone), who uses the tourist town as a major hub for assorted illegal operations. Compared to the insidious corruption of the locals, Lendina is a bit disappointing as a villain, since she just kills anyone and everyone who gets in her way or even witnesses the extent of her villainy. Stone has fun, at least, even if the routine character gets a clichéd scene where she dances in order to display how unhinged she actually is.

This means Hutch has to respond with violence, including one brawl on one of those cramped boats, where the professional killer takes it relatively easy on his attackers until they escalate things, and another in a warehouse, which Tjahjanto initially teases with a still exterior shot that only provides the sounds of carnage and the sight of a couple henchmen fleeing in terror. The staging of that scene is also intriguing, by the way, in how it's initially framed as a moral dilemma for Hutch, and if there's not much to these characters, the screenplay by Derek Kolstad (returning from the original) and Aaron Rabin does keep them in mind in between the action beats, at least.

To be clear, Nobody 2 is essentially a rehash of the first film, from its plot to a couple of action sequences. The boat scene, for example, is basically the bus one from the original, while the booby-trapped office of the first becomes a booby-trapped amusement park this time. These could seem to be only cosmetic changes. If somebody really believes there's no discernible difference between an office and an amusement park, there's probably no convincing that person that a sequel can be simultaneously the same as and notably different from its predecessor. This one succeeds because it is both of those things.

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