NOBODY

The picture’s climax – and plenty of other scenes - could easily be mistaken for an episode of camp eighties TV show The A-Team.

It used to be the case that a kidnapped daughter was the catalyst needed to start a bloody revenge trail. Then it was a dead dog. And in Nobody it merely takes a stolen kitty cat bracelet for Bob Odenkirk to dust off his intelligence agency combat techniques and take on the Russian mafia.

While this does yield a handful of interesting action scenes - a fistfight on a bus is the most memorable - Nobody adds frustratingly little in the way of innovation to the revenge genre as the picture goes through predictable narrative motions, positions one-dimensional villains as the antagonist and builds towards a climax that could very well be mistaken for an episode of eighties TV show The A-Team.

Clearly the film intends all of the above to be taken as an exercise in irony, evidenced by the incessant use of innocuous songs on the soundtrack whenever violence erupts on-screen, but in the end Nobody is just another movie in a long line of predictable action films that might momentarily hold your attention yet for all its sound and fury signifies next to nothing.

release: 2021

director: Ilya Naishuller

starring: Bob Odenkirk, Aleksey Serebryakov, Connie Nielsen, Christopher Lloyd