Let me start with a confession.
I went into Normal, the new Bob Odenkirk chaos machine directed by Ben Wheatley, fully prepared to be disappointed. I’d seen both Nobody films. I liked the first one well enough. The second one felt like it was running on fumes and brand loyalty. And while, I didn’t really think Odenkirk could possibly work as an action hero… I have begrudgingly come to respect what he has built in this theatrical space. I mean, if you’d told me in 2010 that Saul Goodman was going to become one of the more reliably entertaining action stars working today, I’d have laughed in your face — I went in with managed expectations.
Then I took my GMN group to go see Normal.
For the uninitiated, GMN stands for Guy Movie Night. It is exactly what it sounds like. A bunch of dorks, buckets o’ popcorn, a film that was almost certainly not going to be nominated for anything meaningful, and the collective willingness to check your critical brain at the door for 90 minutes in service of just having a fantastic time. And I want to be extremely clear: the presence of the GMN group elevated Normal from a movie I would have called “perfectly serviceable” into a movie I am still laughing about 24 hours later.
Here is the premise, and I promise it will make complete sense even though it sounds completely insane: Bob Odenkirk plays a man named Ulysses Richardson, and yes, “Ulysses Richardson” is his actual name, and yes, the film is fully aware of how absurd that is, who works as an interim sheriff. Not a sheriff. An interim sheriff. He fills in between permanent appointments, rolling from small town to small town like some kind of badge-wearing temp worker. His latest assignment is a quaint, snowbound Midwestern municipality called Normal, Minnesota. And, this should not surprise you, Normal is anything but.
Within days of Ulysses arriving, a botched bank robbery blows the lid off a conspiracy that runs straight through the mayor’s office. The mayor, by the way, is played by Henry Winkler. You know, The Fonz? Happy Days? Hello? I am getting way too old for this. Oh, and by the way, Henry Winkler is the villain in this movie, and he commits to that choice with an alarming and deeply entertaining enthusiasm that I was completely unprepared for. Every scene he’s in is better than it has any right to be. Lena Headey shows up as a local bartender named Moira who knows more than she lets on, and she brings exactly the kind of sharp-eyed, low-key ferocity that she’s been bringing to roles for twenty years. She’s great. She’s always great.
And then the Yakuza show up.
I need you to understand that when the Yakuza arrived, my GMN group collectively lost their minds. Full theater chaos. One of our guys knocked his entire drink over. We were in absolute shambles, and we loved every single second of it.
Here’s the thing about Normal that I want to make sure comes through in this review: it knows exactly what it is. Ben Wheatley — who you might know from Free Fire, which is one of the more stylish and genuinely unhinged action films of the last decade — has made a movie that operates with the logic of a particularly violent cartoon. The action escalates to increasingly preposterous levels with a cheerful, almost affectionate shamelessness. There’s a shootout late in the film that is just an absolute free-for-all of carnage and dark comedy, and Wheatley shoots it with the kind of gleeful, over-the-top energy that makes you feel like the director was having the time of his life behind the camera. Some of the eye-related violence in this film is genuinely the most grimace-inducing stuff I’ve sat through in years, and yet it somehow always lands on the side of darkly funny rather than actually disturbing. That’s a harder needle to thread than it looks.
Odenkirk, for his part, is doing what Odenkirk does best: playing a fundamentally decent man who is very, very good at violence and slightly sheepish about it. The character of Ulysses has a bit more texture than the Nobody films gave him, there’s a marriage in trouble, a sense of a man who keeps moving because standing still costs him too much, and while the film doesn’t go particularly deep on any of that, it gives Odenkirk just enough to work with so that you’re rooting for him rather than just watching him.
Is Normal a great film? No. Absolutely not. This is not the movie you bring to your film theory professor as evidence that contemporary action cinema has something to say. The plot is thin. Numerous characters exist as red shirts… they are there primarily to be shot, blown up, or eviscerated in various ways. The thematic content is, let’s call it, modest. This is a B-movie that has been made with A-level craft and the complete, self-aware understanding that what it’s selling is a good time, and nothing more complicated than that.
And here is what I want to say to you directly: that is enough. Sometimes that is more than enough.
I have seen both Nobody films. I found the first one decent, and the second one disappointingly rote. Normal beats both of them, and it isn’t particularly close. The combination of Wheatley’s visual style — which keeps things kinetic and weird in ways the Nobody films never quite managed — with Kolstad’s gonzo plotting and Odenkirk’s particular flavor of reluctant mayhem adds up to something that feels fresh even when it’s retreading familiar territory.
But honestly? The most important variable in my enjoyment of Normal was the people sitting next to me. If you see this movie alone on a Tuesday afternoon, you’ll probably think it’s fine. If you see it with your people — your GMN crew, your ride-or-die film friends, whoever that group is for you — you will have a borderline transcendent experience. Movies like Normal exist to be witnessed communally. The laugh hits harder when someone else is already laughing. The groan lands better in stereo. The chaos is more glorious when you’re sharing it.
Go see Normal. Take someone with you. Preferably several someones.
Leave your critical brain at home. It doesn’t belong in this particular town.
