A few years ago, Derek Kolstad (formerly and famously of Team John Wick) collaborated with Bob Odenkirk and made him the unlikeliest action star in recent memory. The film was Nobody, and it kicked so much ass that we got a sequel last year. A sequel that failed to make any kind of box office impact.
So here we are with Normal, another film written/produced by Kolstad, with Odenkirk starring/producing and story-writing. And it’s got a curiously similar title. And here’s the punchline: The film is directed by Ben Wheatley. The journeyman filmmaker who brought us such forgettable and misguided near-misses as Free Fire, Rebecca (2020), and freaking Meg 2.
Put it all together and what do you get? Well, we’ve got another forgettable near-miss on our hands, but at least this one’s got a good helping of that Derek Kolstad flavoring.
Even before we arrive at the sleepy snow-covered rural town of Normal, Minnesota, we open with a prologue about the Yakuza. So the film essentially spoils its own big reveal and tells us right up front that Normal has ties with organized crime all the way out in Japan.
Anyway, Normal is a town with a population of just under 2,000. And their sheriff recently died under opaque circumstances. Enter Ulysses (Odenkirk), a cop stepping in from out-of-state to serve as the acting sheriff until Normal can properly elect a new one. I hasten to add that Ulysses recently lost his wife and his own sheriff’s position for reasons that still wake him up screaming from PTSD flashbacks.
The bottom line is that Ulysses is there to keep his head down and the town functioning. He’s not here to make waves or leave any kind of impression, he’s only interested in safely keeping everything on the rails until Normal can be someone else’s problem. Even so, he can’t help noticing that the town seems to have more automatic rifles and C4 bricks than people by a factor of ten to one. And everyone seems to have their own suspiciously large safe. Also, the Town Hall and the late sheriff’s house each look like they cost more than all the rest of Normal put together.
Of course, due to the aforementioned prologue, we the audience already know perfectly well that this town is being kept afloat by the Yakuza. Ulysses himself is only just starting to piece it together when a couple of bumbling vagrants (Lori and Keith, respectively played by Reena Jolly and Brendan Fletcher) get desperate enough to try robbing the local bank. They fucked with the Yakuza money, and everything keeps on spiraling out of control from there.
Given the similar name and the overlapping creative team, the obvious point of comparison would be with Nobody. But while this film is likewise preoccupied with themes of aging, mortality, and redemption, it actually has a lot more in common with Hot Fuzz. Both are movies about the culture clash resulting from a big city cop getting transferred to a rural backwater. Both films are centered around the conflict of said big city cop standing alone and gunning his way through literally everyone in said rural backwater. Because both films are primarily about conformity and the ultimate cost of sacrifices made for “the greater good”.
I need hardly add that both films were made and marketed for explosive and bloody action fun, and that’s exactly what we’ve got here. Sure, it’s pretty much entirely limited to the back half, but the action picks up in a big way when it finally gets going. We’ve got vehicular mayhem, we’ve got knife fights, we’ve got an awesomely ingenious sequence about spotting the difference between dynamite and road flares, and we’ve got so very many different ways for characters to kill each other (and even themselves, accidentally) with guns. But the highlight here are the Rube Goldberg contraptions, in which someone gets killed through a wildly improbable sequence of events like something straight out of a Final Destination picture. Sure, it’s laughably contrived, but at least it gets a laugh all the same.
With all of that said, the film is most important in how it sets itself apart from Hot Fuzz. For one thing, Ulysses doesn’t have a massive chip on his shoulder the way Nicholas Angel does. Ulysses doesn’t start out looking to prove a point or impose his sense of justice onto anyone else, he’s only here to suffer through this thankless temp job because that’s the penance he thinks he deserves.
More importantly, our antagonist this time doesn’t really come from within the town. It comes from the Yakuza. The townsfolk of Normal are only trying to kill Ulysses and those stupid bank robbers because they’re afraid of getting cut off — and/or getting outright slaughtered — by the only reason they have any money. Normal is only one of countless tiny little towns getting decimated by the bigger cities, late-stage capitalism, online delivery, etc. So in effect, they’re getting bullied around by the cities, corporations, and crime syndicates who have all the money.
In execution, there are all these neat little ways that the film uses violence as a metaphor for class disparity. There are all these little ways that the film subverts expectations and takes the plot in some unexpected direction, all in ways that directly enhance the overall themes. That said, I take some issue with making the Yakuza the big bad. Remember, the basic conceit here is that the uber-wealthy are steadily corrupting the town, remaking it in their image because the locals are too afraid to say no. And the uber-wealthy are here embodied by nameless, faceless, disposable brown-skinned people who don’t speak English. I don’t know if the xenophobia was intentional, but there are certainly shades of it nonetheless.
Oh, and as long as we’re getting to the drawbacks, let’s talk about the supporting cast.
Henry Winkler and Lena Headey were both given huge prominence in the marketing — complete with top billing, second only to Odenkirk himself — and they each get maybe two minutes of screen time. Sure, that’s enough for such talented and charismatic actors to leave an impression, but it doesn’t take away from the sense that they’re terribly underutilized. I could also point to Lori and Keith — our hapless bank robbers — who don’t contribute much to the film after starting this whole clusterfuck. Sure, they add a lot thematically, but not so much in terms of plot. Elsewhere, Billy MacLellan and Ryan Allen play a couple of sheriff’s deputies who bring more comic relief than anything else.
On the other hand, we do get Alex (Jess McLeod), a war veteran stuck with substance issues and PTSD on top of grief over their father, the late sheriff. Alex kicks ass in a big way, and McLeod turns in a hell of a performance. Trouble is, Alex spends something like two-thirds of the running time either locked in a jail cell or wholly absent.
(Side note: It’s unclear and inconsistent as to how Alex identifies, but there is a line of dialogue that implies Alex doesn’t identify as female. And I do know that McLeod identifies as non-binary. So to be safe about it, I’m referring to both the character and the actor by they/them pronouns.)
Getting back to the Hot Fuzz comparison, that movie was two hours long while this one is 90 minutes. Turns out that extra half-hour makes quite a difference. Sure, it’s hardly a bad thing for a shoot-’em-up action film to move at a brisk pace, but it feels like more time was needed to give the supporting cast their due. The only character here who’s given any kind of sufficient time for development is Ulysses. And sure, that makes sense, he’s the protagonist. But the town itself and the people within it are at least as important. If we don’t have that, the stakes don’t carry the needed heft.
At its heart and core, this is a film about a town of people who refuse to be written off as inconsequential. They demand to be seen, they demand to be heard, and they are literally fighting to the death — down to the last goddamn drop of blood –for survival. But they get killed en masse and the film keeps going like they were never even there. Like it doesn’t make a difference whether it was a named character or a stunt performer who got blown to a red mist. Even when the supporting characters survive or escape, there’s no sense of how that makes anything different or leads to any kind of sustainable change.
Put simply, the film defeated its own thematic point.
Normal is one of those frustrating movies that isn’t bad, but consistently haunted by the looming sense that it should’ve been better. It’s like the movie was written and shot to be an effectively balanced and introspective action/suspense thriller, but then half an hour got lopped off in editing to make it a quick and disposable action romp. Once again, the creative minds behind John Wick prove that while they’re all aces in action, they’re terrible at making action genre hybrids (see also: The Fall Guy, Love Hurts, Bullet Train, etc.).
The bottom line here is that while the film does bear a comfortable resemblance to certain other action films before it, the end result is different enough and enjoyable enough on its own merits that it earns the right to exist. I don’t think I could recommend a big screen viewing, but it’s easily worth a home rental at least.