Nobody 2 (2025)

Bob Odenkirk with a sword. It’s either the most ridiculous image you’ll see this year or oddly fitting, depending on how you feel about middle-aged men discovering they’re unnervingly good at violence. Nobody 2 leans into that strange idea completely, and somehow, it works more often than it should.

Hutch Mansell owes thirty million dollars to people who don’t exactly send polite reminder letters. His way out? Taking on even more assassination contracts, spinning into the kind of vicious loop that would make any debt counsellor despair. Kill to cover a killing. Repeat until your marriage breaks down or you do.

So of course, Hutch decides the answer is a family holiday. Timo Tjahjanto steps in as director and wastes no time announcing his approach—by transforming a cheerful theme park into a full-blown battlefield. Where the first film felt tied to suburban grit, this sequel lets loose with cartoon logic. Hutch dispatches enemies with funhouse mirrors, carousel horses, and even bits of ornamental nautical décor. The fights tip from brutal into absurd, landing somewhere between live-action Tom and Jerry—though, thankfully, without the cats.

Odenkirk is still the film’s strongest weapon. His training shows in every sequence, and his grounded physicality sells Hutch’s skills without making him look like a superhero. There’s a bluntness to his violence that feels real. Between dismantling drug dealers, he apologises to his kids for the trouble. It shouldn’t be charming, but it is.

What keeps the chaos tethered is its psychological core. Hutch embodies a suburban father’s impossible dream—being exceptional at something that matters. Unfortunately, the “something” is killing people, which makes family dinners complicated. The film leans into this contradiction without ever lecturing the audience.

Sharon Stone steps in as the mastermind behind Plummerville’s crime scene, and she’s clearly enjoying every moment. Her performance teeters between menace and camp, sometimes toppling into the latter. One scene involving interpretive dance will either make you grin or squirm—or both.

Connie Nielsen returns as Becca, bringing a weary authenticity to a wife watching her husband vanish into his “work” again. The details may shift, but the heartbreak feels familiar. John Ortiz and Colin Hanks show up as corrupt local officials, effective but underused. Christopher Lloyd, memorable in the first film, feels wasted this time.

At 89 minutes, the pacing stumbles. Some parts feel hurried, others unnecessarily stretched. Tjahjanto’s choreography is inventive, but the frantic editing sometimes muddles the action. If you can’t follow the geography of a fight, even the wildest kills lose punch.

Beneath the mayhem, though, sits a thread of social critique. The corruption of small-town leisure mirrors wider anxieties about authenticity in late capitalism. Even a family holiday is packaged, sold, and weaponised. The film never dwells on these ideas, but they give unexpected weight to the carnage.

Nobody 2 succeeds as smart, straightforward entertainment. Its central absurdity stays fresh because Odenkirk commits so completely. Watching him tear through armed thugs is consistently fun, with humour emerging naturally from character, not cheap self-awareness.

It won’t reshape the action genre or end up on critics’ year-end lists. What it offers is ninety minutes of clever, chaotic spectacle built around a performance that makes “suburban assassin” strangely believable. In a world drowning in bloated superhero epics, there’s something refreshing about a film that knows its limits and plays within them.

The formula may be familiar, but execution outweighs originality. With action this sharp and a lead this committed, familiarity becomes comfort instead of contempt. Sometimes, that’s more than enough.