In the this-can’t-be-happening action thriller Nobody, Bob Odenkirk, star of the linked TV series Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, fires up one of the oldest lines in the book.
His character Hutch Mansell is making breakfast somewhere in suburban America. Hutch’s teenage son Blake (Gage Munroe) walks into the kitchen, checks out his dad’s bruised and bloody face and tells him, “You look like shit.” His father responds, “You should see the other guys.’’
He speaks the truth. Indeed, it would be difficult for Blake to see the other guys. His mild-mannered auditor father met them, five young hoons, on a bus. He had just been stopped from doing something he would have liked to do. As he sees the gang pour out of a SUV and head to the bus, he thinks, “They say God doesn’t close one door without opening another. Please God open that door.”
His prayer is answered and the fight scene that follows is visually spectacular, up there with the best. It’s also spectacularly unbelievable, as the filmmakers intend.
This movie is written by Derek Kolstad, creator of the John Wick franchise. Its producers include former stuntman David Leitch, who made his directorial debut with the first John Wick film and then went on to make Atomic Blonde and Deadpool 2.
This talent pool tells you something about Nobody. If you like theatrically violent, slickly paced, humorously scripted, well-acted movies this one might work for you. If you don’t like high body counts and regular use of the F-word, it might not.
The action opens without action. In a Groundhog Day moment we see the daily grind that is Hutch’s life: coffee in a go cup, garbage to the kerb, bus to work, doing the numbers at a metal fabrication plant, bus home, wife (Connie Nielsen), nagging that he didn’t put the bin out on time so it’s still full of trash. That’s Monday. Hit the repeat button.
Then, one night, two robbers break into the family home. They are high and armed. Blake comes downstairs and tackles one. His dad grabs a golf club and has a clear chance to take a swing at the other. Yet he holds back. The robbers escape with some cash, Hutch’s watch and, to their unknown grave error, his young daughter’s Kitty Cat bracelet.
Everybody, even the police, tells Hutch he wimped out. He cops that because he’s a self-described nobody. “I was just trying to keep damage to a minimum,’’ he explains in what will turn out to be a significant understatement.
For they – and we – have no idea who this nobody used to be. I don’t want to spoil the surprise, so let’s just say that there are auditors who clean up books and auditors who deal with other messes. When Hutch goes looking for “that motherf..king bracelet’’, as he puts it, a veteran spots a tattoo on his wrist, thanks him for his service … and locks himself in another room.
That fight on the bus introduces the main baddie in a movie full of baddies. Yulian Kuznetsov (Russian actor Aleksey Serebryakov) is a singing, dancing, van Gogh owning Russian mobster, “as bad as they come: a connected, funded sociopath”. His younger brother was one of the five hoons on that bus.
This sets up the main plot line: the Russian mafia deciding to dispense with a nobody, to scrape him off their shoes, perhaps literally.
Serebryakov, so good in the 2014 film Leviathan, is a riot to watch, from the moment he walks onto stage in the nightclub he owns and belts out a tune.
The director, Ilya Naishuller, is also Russian. He is the founder of the indie band Biting Elbows and he has a lot of fun with the soundtrack.
The opening song, with the camera on Hutch, is Don’t Let Me Be Understood, sung by Nina Simone. “I’m just a soul whose intentions are good / Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.’’ Later, Straighten Up and Fly Right, and What a Wonderful World are well used.
I’m a huge fan of Odenkirk from Better Call Saul, as is my 15-year-old co-viewer. He did not let us down. Is he an action hero like Keanu Reeves? No. Does that make what he does in this movie believable? No and yes, in a strangely satisfying way.
This is not an emotionally deep film, but it does raise interesting questions about whether the life we once lived is the one we prefer.
And this brings in our favourite character, who is worth waiting for to see in his full glory. It’s Hutch’s father, David, who we first meet in an aged care home. So, he’s even more of a nobody, someone who does not matter, or so it seems.
He is played by Christopher Lloyd, who shows that he can still go back to the future.
When Hutch Sr and Hutch Jr are in a tight spot, the son looks on as the father opens his carry bags.
“You brought a lot of shotguns,’’ he observes. Dad delivers the line of the film, as an overture to its most sustained John Wick moment, “You brought a lot of Russians.”
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Rosemary’s Way (G)
In cinemas from April 20. Details: rosemaryswaythefilm.org/watch/
★★★★
When Pasca, a young refugee from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, first met Rosemary Kariuki, it was a cold winter’s day in the western Sydney suburb of Auburn. Rosemary, herself a migrant from Kenya, asked the younger woman why she wasn’t wearing a jumper. She said she couldn’t afford one.
Rosemary, who came to Australia in 1999, did what she does: she helped. Interviewed today, Pasca says her first response was simple wonder that someone had taken the time to speak to her. She goes on, “It was a miracle for me. I met an angel on the street.”
Pasca, who had childhood polio and was separated from her parents as war engulfed her home country, is one of the women central to Rosemary’s Way, a documentary that everyone should watch. What it shows, above all, is that there are people with good hearts, and it feels like the right time to be reminded of that.
It is a beautiful illustration of the power of doing small good things, as Raymond Carver put it in his famous short story (which Robert Altman included in his 1993 film Short Cuts). Because small good things, such as a winter jumper, can be big things to some people.
It is a tribute to people such as Rosemary for putting the theory of a multicultural community, which we have and should be proud of, into practice. On Australia Day this year she received the Local Hero award in the Australian of the Year Awards for her work with migrant and refugee women.
This film is written and directed by Ros Horin, former artistic director of Sydney’s Griffin Theatre Company. It is her second film, following The Baulkham Hills African Ladies Troupe (2016). She is keen to tell the stories of migrants and refugees, particularly women who often find themselves isolated and lonely in their new home because of poverty, ignorance or husbands who rule as they did in the old country. “My house is like a small Iraq,” one says.
Rosemary’s day job is as a multicultural liaison officer with the NSW Police Force, based at the Parramatta cop shop. After-hours and on the weekends she organises cultural exchange programs that encourage women from different cultures out of their homes to meet, talk, share food and, if the mood is right, sing and dance.
This program includes biannual weekend trips to regional and rural NSW, where the women are hosted by Australian families. Seeing this — women from Congo, Iraq, India, Bangladesh, Peru, the “whole United Nations” as one puts it — sitting around the dinner table with an Australian farming couple is just wonderful. These Australians, like Rosemary, are local heroes.
Listening to the women talk about their lives before they met Rosemary is proof that we do in fact live in a lucky country. It also shows the strength and resilience of people who came here because to stay where they were would be to die. Some fled war and/or family abuse. Rosemary’s own story has its terror, which she tells us about.
Some came here in arranged marriages to men of their own culture and suffered domestic abuse. Some, such as Pasca, are from poor villages. Some, such as Sufia from Bangladesh and Anushka from India, are university educated. All of them were almost prisoners in their own homes. Most of them cry as they tell their story. “Isolation is one of the biggest problems in the migrant community,” Rosemary says.
Pasca has three young boys. Their father is not seen or discussed. She hopes that one day she will leave Auburn for the first time and go to an “Aussie area” and see real Aussies. Rosemary makes this happen, on a bus trip to the NSW south coast. The Australian hosts are kind and welcoming. They want to know about the women’s lives.
When Pasca’s sons see the bush, the wildlife and the surf, the look of their faces is so sweet. Children are children. Watching them I made a note to take my son to see the Kiama Blowhole, even though I know, at 15, I’ll need to twist his arm a little. I also want him to watch this film.
Rosemary admits the life she has adopted can be stressful, but she sails through with love, a smile and humour. Hearing her on the phone organising an event is wryly funny. “Please don’t come late,” she asks. “I don’t use African time.”
Towards the end, Rosemary puts her philosophy in simple terms. We are all human beings. We should break out of our cultural silos and embrace and enjoy each other’s cultures. We should mainstream, not marginalise.
She deserves the final word: “For me, being happy, I believe you have to make other people happy.”
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Nobody
In cinemas
★★★½