91 min | R | March 26, 2021 | Universal Pictures
Hutch Mansell is a suburban pushover who eats insults and misses the bus. Then a home invasion flips a switch that should have stayed off, and the mild dad turns out to be a man with a body count. Turning the other cheek was always the act.
Hutch Mansell is a man who absorbs insults for a living. He misses garbage day, takes shit from his son, and lets two burglars walk out of his house when he could have stopped them. Everyone reads this as weakness. The film is about the dangerous fiction of the suburban nobody, the man who buried a lethal past under a cardigan and a commute and now needs an excuse to dig it up. A petty robbery becomes that excuse, and Hutch goes looking for trouble until trouble finds a Russian gangster who can supply all of it.
Bob Odenkirk plays Hutch with the deadness of a man performing his own emasculation. He carries the exhaustion of someone who chose this small life and resents the choice. When the violence arrives, Odenkirk fights like a man out of practice and furious about it, taking as many hits as he lands. Aleksey Serebryakov plays Yulian Kuznetsov as a vain crime boss who sings karaoke and counts his money, which makes him more unnerving than a standard heavy. Christopher Lloyd plays Hutch’s father David with sly relish, an old man in a retirement home who comes alive when handed a shotgun. RZA plays Harry, the brother on the radio, with a calm that suggests this family has done all of this before.
Ilya Naishuller directs the action with a brutal patience that refuses to glamorize the hits. The standout is a fight on a city bus where Hutch and five attackers wreck each other in a cramped space, and the camera stays close enough to register every broken bone and missed punch. Derek Kolstad writes the everyman-assassin template he built for John Wick, and the seams show. The needle drops run ironic against the carnage, pairing crooner standards with bloodshed for a joke that lands twice and then keeps repeating. The production design loads Hutch’s basement and his father’s room with the hardware of men who were never as ordinary as they pretended.
This is a competent machine built from familiar parts. It knows exactly what it is and never reaches past it, which is both its discipline and its ceiling. The premise of a suppressed killer is sharper than the movie has the appetite to explore, and Kolstad settles for escalation when he could have dug into the rot underneath. What saves it is Odenkirk, who plays the fantasy and the sadness at the same time. The film wants you to cheer when Hutch stops being nobody, and it earns the cheer without earning much else.