After John Wick, Nobody and after Nobody, Normal, all films written by Derek Kolstad and all telling essentially the same story – mess with this seemingly placid dude at your peril.
Normal is Bob Odenkirk going around the block one more time with Kolstad – Nobody one and two did good business so why not? But this time Kolstad has Coen brothers ambitions in his broadening out of the landscape and deepening of the characterisation. Though for the most part it is another example of Kolstad as the consummate Hollywood writer – everything has its place and everything has its pace, and a detail dropped in now is surely going to pay off later, often in spectacular action-frenzy style.
The story here is of Odenkirk as Ulysses Richardson, an interim sheriff temporarily in a town called Normal, Minnesota, a place that’s superficially just a standard place. But Normal has its secrets… how come that fund for the church roof hit its target so quickly, for instance? And why is the police station packed to the rafters with high-tech weaponry? Ulysses finds both a bit puzzling, but is reluctant to stir things up by asking questions when he’ll be moving on shortly. It’s Ulysses’s reluctant journey to enlightenment – the audience knows the yakuza are somehow involved – that’s the arc of the film.
Kolstad does dry very well, as does director Ben Wheatley, who has previous with action movies – Free Fire is a particularly knotty bijou outing, and Meg 2: The Trench is also pretty dry for a movie set in the ocean.
Kolstad and Wheatley spend some time with the characters before hitting the action-frenzy button. Lena Headey’s barkeep, Moira. Jess McLeod as Alex, the previous sheriff’s troubled daughter. Peter Shinkoda as Joe, a yakuza regent secretly running the town. But most of all Henry Winkler’s Mayor Kibner, officially the man in charge but in fact the guy who’s sold the town’s soul to gangster interests. As in the TV show Barry, Winkler is this movie’s secret weapon and when he’s not on screen it suffers.
Acts one and two are what we’ve come to expect from Kolstad – nice dude realises the time for pussyfooting is over and is forced to lunge into action. Odenkirk, in his 60s, puts a smarts-not-moves spin on this, Ulysses being more mouth than trousers, with a good line in cheap psychologising, usually deployed to distract his foe. In act three Kolstad tries to ease away from the Wick/Nobody formula while taking his audience with him. Leaving violence behind a touch, Ulysses becomes a real cop – rather than one marking time – and tries to work out what’s going on in this town behind the smiles and the cheery “good day” he’s offered by all and sundry.
Perhaps suspecting that this isn’t quite working, or maybe just yielding to the demands of the paying public, Kolstad, Wheatley and Odenkirk eventually abandon all this for a finale that’s as gloriously bloody as the bloodthirsty could want, in a sequence choreographed to Dr Hook’s When You’re in Love with a Beautiful Woman – funny.
En route we’ve had the sort of novel violence fans have come to expect/demand from Kolstad. The fight scene set in a shop selling woollen yarn was a standout. What’s less expected is the faint political angle – the left-behinds and their relationship to authority in a “revenge of Main Street” populism-versus-old-values ethos that’s a long way from Kolstad’s usual fare.
Odenkirk did the publicity rounds trying to puff some wind into this movie, as did Wheatley, but the whole thing is just a touch underwhelming, neither the pure shot of hormones into the heart nor the deeper examination of human frailty that the Coens specialise in, which seems to be the covert aim here.
Highly watchable though it is, Normal may be just a touch too normal.
Normal – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
