After becoming an unlikely action star in Nobody and its sequel, Bob Odenkirk is back for another round in new action-packed crime caper Normal.
Best known for his turn as seedy lawyer Saul Goodman in Breaking Bad and its prequel series Better Call Saul, Odenkirk’s career took an abrupt pivot in 2021 with a turn from comedy and drama to ass-kicking, and Normal continues this trajectory. Directed by Ben Wheatley, whose oeuvre covers titles from Jason Statham shark sequel Meg 2: The Trench to JG Ballard adaptation High-Rise, Normal was written by John Wick creator Derek Kolstad, who brings his signature slick action to proceedings.
Odenkirk, meanwhile, stars as Ulysses, an interim sheriff standing in as head of law enforcement in Normal, Minnesota, until they elect a new officer. He quickly discovers, however, that the placid, unassuming vibe of the town is no more than a facade – and some violent secrets lurk dangerously close to the surface. And that’s bad news for Ulysses, who isn’t supposed to know any of them.
Three dimensional
Just like in Nobody, then, Odenkirk plays a guy thrust into an outlandish situation that requires him to fight for his life, but he thinks Normal has something more in common with his previous two action movies than just one-word titles beginning with ‘n’.
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“There are things from these movies that are in the first act that are as honest as I can play them, and feel like they motivate the main character. And then in all three of these cases, those films become this self-aware movie experience that explodes into a conceptual place that hopefully you can laugh at and enjoy,” Odenkirk says at a post-screening Q&A attended by GamesRadar+.
Action aside, which is predictably great (Kolstad knows what he’s doing, after all), this is a movie that still manages to be very funny. It’s not all slapstick and physical comedy, either, and there are some good old-fashioned jokes woven into the script, including a running gag about Ulysses’ second-in-command’s new leather jacket, which remains funny long after it should. This is a film that’s well aware it’s offering up something offbeat, but it’s an offering on a silver platter. Come along for the ride, and you’ll be rewarded.
Twists and turns
Underneath all that, though, is a darker undercurrent, and I think it’s this lighter touch that conversely enables easier access to the more somber themes. It turns out the mayor of Normal (played by an on-form Henry Winkler) picked Ulysses for a reason: because he has a light touch to his law-keeping. We find out that Ulysses swapped his full-time job for interim gigs because of a shameful secret that he wants to scrub from his resume – a time when his “light touch” had devastating consequences.
“I don’t try to tie things up. I’d rather try to get an audience who likes action films to have a moment or two where they think about serious things and feel things on a deeper level, because a lot of action movies don’t even try to do that,” Odenkirk continues. “They just go right to the action and stay there with the thinnest shell of motivation. ‘Your daughter’s been taken. I better go kill all those guys'” (Wheatley, also present for the Q&A, quips that this sounds like a pretty good movie).
“You can smuggle in some heavy feelings and challenging situations into pure entertainment, but there is a point where you gotta get out of the way and let it just be the fun ride that people bought a ticket for, but maybe you gave them something a little more to think about and feel at the end of it,” the actor says. “That’s my grand psychology of what I’m trying to do in this genre.”
Normal is out now in UK cinemas. For more on what to watch, check out the rest of our Big Screen Spotlight series.
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