Nothing In Nobody 2 Can Top The First Film's Best Action Scene

This article contains spoilers for "Nobody 2."

After "John Wick" blew the doors off what a contemporary action movie could look like, a wave of clones arrived in its wake to varying success. Among one-offs like "Bullet Train" and "The Fall Guy" lies the Christmas smackdown "Violent Night," with David Harbour set to deliver some more season's beatings in a sequel next December. The Ilya Naishuller-directed "Nobody" showed the most promise, as it featured "Better Call Saul" star Bob Odenkirk in his first big action movie role. The latest entry in the dad vengeance subgenre kick-started by "Taken" was a modest success, as it garnered a positive critical reception and enough money at the box office to warrant a sequel.

Four years later, Odenkirk's Hutch Mansell is back in theaters with "Nobody 2," a summertime follow-up that sees our lead butt kicker attempting to spend time with his family on vacation, only to find himself in more trouble than he'd like. It's a much sunnier movie, as the film takes place in a water park Hutch used to frequent in his childhood. With Timo Tjahjanto taking over directing duties, Sharon Stone as the villain, and a merciful 89-minute runtime, all signs pointed to "Nobody 2" possibly being an improvement over the first movie. While /Film's Witney Seibold gave this sequel a mostly positive review, I have somewhat less affection for it.

"Nobody 2" wants to be a blood-soaked cousin to "National Lampoon's Vacation," as both feature a psychotic father with violent tendencies trying to spend time with his wife and kids, yet can't seem to escape his own worst impulses. The difference between the two is that Chevy Chase's Clark Griswold is a much more fleshed-out character who genuinely feels dangerous to be around, and it's not even an action movie. The "Nobody" movies are such strange underwritten beasts that feature a bunch of cool ideas, and not a whole lot of follow-through, with Odenkirk making do with a thin script.

Sharon Stone's scenery-chewing Lendina is hardly given anything to do, while a subplot concerning Connie Nielsen's Becca feels like it's been haphazardly snipped out of the film. One of the more interesting threads in "Nobody 2" is this confrontation of inherited violence from the sins of the fathers, only to drop it almost as quickly as it's introduced. For casual moviegoers, this kind of stuff won't really matter because they're there to indulge in some goofy, head-smashing carnage from the star of one of the most celebrated shows of the 21st century, and I can't blame them. Unfortunately, there isn't a single action sequence in "Nobody 2" that matches the intense thrills and laughs of the bus brawl from the first movie.

The most glaring issue with 2021's "Nobody" is that it flirts with being a dark satire about a suburban dad reaching his breaking point, yet never fully commits to the concept. At the very least, Odenkirk proves how hard he worked to train for his role in some pretty fun action sequences that are an unmistakable ode to "John Wick." It should come as no surprise that the best one takes advantage of this dichotomy with Hutch's busbound beatdown.

Before getting on the bus, Hutch's investigation surrounding a break-in at the Mansell residence comes to an unsatisfying impasse. The former government assassin realizes that the robbers who got the drop on him are nothing more than an ordinary couple just trying to get some extra money to pay for their baby's medical treatments. Hutch's fatherly instincts essentially give him the beatdown blue balls, but the film gifts this character his bloodthirsty catharsis on a silver platter with the arrival of five drunken troublemakers hopping aboard the bus. "Please, God. Open that door," Hutch prays in his internal monologue. A sick little smile surfaces on Hutch's face when they start harassing people on the bus, leading him to walk past them, politely nudge the bus driver out, empty his pistol's chamber, and herald his judgment day upon them.

Part of what makes the first part of this sequence so great is that Odenkirk gets his ass handed to him. We know something's bubbling under the surface just waiting to come out, but it's been some time since he's doled out his extrajudicial beatings. Everything looks and sounds like it really hurts on both ends, which is only exacerbated by some great sound design. The punches, kicks, and stabs reverberate against silence. We slowly start to see Hutch regain his strength, only to get knocked back down again. It's here where Odenkirk's rigorous training is best demonstrated, going so far as to play great moments of physical comedy really well. It's those little details, like Hutch lying across a bus seat only for it to fall under his weight, that go a long way.

It should naturally end when Hutch gets humbly thrown out of the bus window, but he gets right back up and wanders back in to deliver a second helping. All of the goons, meanwhile, can barely stand up and seem pretty annoyed that this wasn't the end of it. The cherry on top is the darkly funny note of Hutch quietly performing a homemade tracheostomy with a straw. After all that setup, the payoff is very rewarding. It puts Hutch on the path to rekindling his violent past, as well as catalyzing the target that gets put on his head by Aleksey Serebryakov's Yulian. It's by no means one of the great action sequences, but it's more consistent than how the violence plays out in "Nobody 2."

You would think securing the director behind such hits as "The Night Comes For Us" and "The Shadow Strays" would only take the "Nobody" franchise to even greater heights, but "Nobody 2" comes across as a studio gig that inhibits his signature trademarks. It's strange because, at the very least, we're all here for Odenkirk kicking some serious butt, and yet this comes across as incredibly neutered. You can almost see "Nobody 2" cackling with a sick glee when Hutch and one of Colin Hank's men are fighting in proximity to an operating table saw, just waiting for someone's head to transform into a watermelon. The summertime red shirt goes headfirst, but the film shies away from the full impact, only showing a smidge of blood spatter landing onto Hutch's face. Most of "Nobody 2" is like this, whether it be an elevator fight, an arcade beatdown, or Lendina's offscreen casino slaughter.

There's a bit within a hall of mirrors that Hutch has rigged to blow up, and all we really get is an external explosion with Lendina's tactical team just running out of it. The same can be said of another "Home Alone"-rigged booby trap in the finale with a landmine inside of a ball pit, in which you can barely see what's happening once it goes off. Its goriest moment has to be a water slide that's been retrofitted with a bunch of blades for one of Hutch's adversaries to get hurled into in the vein of 2020's "Aquaslash." They're similar in that both films promise a water park bloodbath, only to have one moment of violence aboard a water slide make any kind of a standout concerning the gore. The duck boat confrontation is probably the closest "Nobody 2" comes to mirroring the close-quarters combat of the bus fight, but it's nowhere near as memorable or nasty, despite one guy getting an anchor in his neck and hurled out to the water.

Setting up a bloodlust wonderland inside a water park, only to shy away and cake most of it in poor CG compositing, gets at the heart of why this franchise already feels like it's out of gas. "Nobody 2" is an R-rated movie that plays as if it's been eviscerated in the edit bay in order to secure a PG-13 rating that's already straddling the line of what's acceptable in terms of levels of screen violence.

"Nobody 2" is now playing in theaters nationwide.