Film

Nobody

Name: Nobody
Genre: Action, Thriller
Released: 2021
Cast: Bob Odenkirk, Aleksey Serebryakov, Connie Nielsen, Christopher Lloyd, Michael Ironside

Bob Odenkirk trades Saul Goodman's silver tongue for a tire iron in this gleefully brutal action comedy about the terrifying gap between how a man looks and what he's actually capable of. Directed with real craft — the bus fight is an instant genre classic — it's lean, funny, and satisfyingly cruel to its villains. Ninety minutes, no fat, built for anyone who misses when action stars actually fought.

TMDb rating

7.9

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Same screenwriter, same stripped-down philosophy: a quiet, grieving man turns out to be the most dangerous person in any room. If Nobody's rhythms clicked, this is the mother lode.

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A pawnshop owner nobody notices turns out to be an ex-black-ops killer once a child he loves is threatened — Nobody's exact premise, played utterly straight and devastatingly well.

But It's far grimmer and more violent than Nobody, with none of the wisecracking to soften the brutality.

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Cronenberg's take on the same idea — a mild diner owner with a buried past — played for dread and moral consequence instead of catharsis. Viggo Mortensen is genuinely chilling.

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Nobody's villain is Russian mob nostalgia for a certain kind of quiet, unglamorous killer — this is the real ancestor of that figure, made in the chaos after the USSR fell, and it shaped how Russian crime cinema pictures men exactly like Yulian.

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Liam Neeson's late-career reinvention as an action star runs on the same fuel as Odenkirk's here: an ordinary-seeming dad who turns out to have a very particular set of skills.

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Denzel Washington as a soft-spoken hardware store clerk hiding decades of lethal expertise — patient, methodical violence delivered with real menace and a similar dark sense of humour.

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Kill Bill: Vol. 12003

Tarantino's operatic, blood-soaked revenge fantasy shares Nobody's love of choreography as spectacle — violence as dance, villains as colourful obstacles to be gloriously dispatched.

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Léon: The Professional1994

The hitman-with-a-soft-side template Nobody borrows from, done with real tenderness alongside the carnage. Jean Reno is magnetic and the action still holds up decades later.

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Violent Night2022no page yet

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Charlize Theron delivers the same kind of bruising, brutally physical set-pieces — a stairwell fight that rivals Nobody's bus brawl for sheer punishing choreography.

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It's the direct ancestor of the home-invasion-awakens-the-monster premise Nobody plays for release — the same structural idea, fifty years earlier, minus the wink.

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Same engine, opposite costume: the humiliated, underestimated family man rediscovering his lethal former life, told as a bright PG superhero comedy instead of an R-rated bloodbath.

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But It's a family cartoon with none of the blood — if you came to Nobody for the violence itself, this swaps it out entirely.