There’s Nothing ‘Normal’ About Bob Odenkirk

Ever just watch something so middling and wonder, “Who is this for?” That was me with the Bob Odenkirk movie Normal. For the record, I think Odenkirk is a comedic genius, and good on him for establishing himself as this new badass shoot-’em-up dude. Get that bag.

But watching Normal, it was hard to understand what they were really going for — one minute, it’s Grumpy Old Men with cute little quips in a small Minnesota town then, just as it looks like it might become A Serious Man, it gets all John Wick with Yakuza dudes and a light sprinkling of exit capitalism.

Normal ★★½ (2.5/5 stars)
Directed by: Ben Wheatley
Written by: Derek Kolstad, Bob Odenkirk
Starring: Bob Odenkirk, Lena Headey, Henry Winkler
Running time: 91 mins

I know Odenkirk is a guy who views himself as lucky to see himself in these kinds of roles; the Better Call Saul alum hit a lick with a second-wind action career that no one saw coming — including him. When he first started pitching himself as an action lead, Odenkirk admitted, “I thought I’d get thrown out of the room. I thought people would laugh in my face.” Instead, Nobody worked, and suddenly Saul Goodman was getting paid to beat the shit out of people.

But the tonal whiplash is basically the whole problem with Normal. Directed by Ben Wheatley (Free Fire, Kill List, ) from a script by Nobody and John Wick creator Derek Kolstad, based on a story by Kolstad and Odenkirk, the 90-minute action-comedy stars Odenkirk as Ulysses, a temporary sheriff who arrives in the sleepy Midwestern town of Normal hoping for a do-nothing-much assignment and instead stumbles into a botched bank robbery, a very big local secret and, eventually, the Yakuza. Henry Winkler plays the town’s mayor, Lena Headey is local bartender Moira, with Brendan Fletcher, Jess McLeod and Peter Shinkoda rounding out the supporting cast.

And there’s a lot going on for such a thin plot. It’s basically: shoot and kill, shoot and kill, all while having a decent attitude about it. There are no real moral complexities, just a guy doing some semblance of a job in a town that happens to be all-in on laundering money for an international crime organization.

There’s a perfectly fun movie buried somewhere in here about Odenkirk as an aging hardass dropped into a town full of oddballs, but Normal keeps getting distracted by what else it could be. Small-town comedy, conspiracy thriller, working-class satire, ultraviolent revenge flick — it keeps trying on genres without ever fully committing to one. The result isn’t terrible enough to hate or weird enough to love. It sort of exists somewhere in that existential ether, occasionally remembering that Odenkirk is extremely good at this shit.

At points, the townspeople of Normal feel like they belong in a horror flick. It’s in the way people move, the way Wheatley paces scenes, the vague sense that something deeply fucked up is happening underneath all that Midwestern pleasantness. Then somebody gets their head blown off and, just as quickly, Ulysses makes a dad joke. That could be a great bit. Here, it mostly feels like the movie changing channels on itself.

If you’re stoned on the couch looking for something extremely low stakes, it does the job. If you’re looking for with nuance, depth, or even comedic integrity, scroll on, Kemosabe: nothing to see here.