This weekend, I watched Heat again for the first time in what turned out to be nearly 20 years. No idea why it took me so long. I saw it in the theater when it came out. I owned it on DVD. I just watched it a few times, I always knew it was a tremendous film, but then it never quite hit the top of my watchlist again.
Which is a shame, because for the first three quarters, it is as close to a perfect movie as I have seen for a while. It was just unfortunate that the final quarter dips a bit, and becomes a bit too reliant on coincidence while proving there were about two plotlines too many. It is still a 95% movie, all day long. That bank job shootout remains breathtaking. The whole movie is fantastic.
I did also notice that it was completely devoid of any laughs.
So I was quietly pleased to see Bob Odenkirk’s latest collaboration with Derek Kolstad appear on my satellite TV provider’s on-demand movie list. Happy days! A bit of violent silliness felt like the perfect counter-programming to accompany Heat in my evening viewing. So another bottle of wine was opened…
This review is spoiler-free.
Normal
First of all, I found myself reflecting on the two types of action hero we still have these days.
There is still the Arnold Schwarzenegger-type action hero. He enters a room looking like somebody genetically engineered a refrigerator to hate communism. He fires a machine gun one-handed while carrying a tree, and his enemies politely wait in a line so he can kill them individually. These days, we have Vin Diesel and The Rock ready to fill these roles.
Then there is the Bob Odenkirk action hero. Bob looks like he has come to fix your broadband. He looks like he would apologise for bumping into you. He looks like he owns a cardigan that has never been involved in a criminal investigation.
If you saw Bob Odenkirk walking down the street, you would assume he was heading to a bookshop, perhaps to buy a biography of a president nobody remembers.
And yet, following the great fun that was Nobody, and Nobody 2 which was not as good but twice as silly, Hollywood has apparently decided that this slightly weary, middle-aged comedy actor is now an action star.
Not an action star pretending to be normal. A normal man who has somehow wandered into an action movie and discovered that shooting people is a surprisingly effective way of resolving administrative problems.
Which brings us to Normal.
Directed by Ben Wheatley, who I simply cannot pin down as a director and I think that might be the idea, and written by Odenkirk and John Wick architect Derek Kolstad, Normal features a town with more secrets than a Hollywood producer’s hard drive, Normal is silly, violent, ridiculous and tremendous fun.
It is also absolutely not normal. Thank God.
Please Do Not Ask Questions
Odenkirk plays Ulysses, a temporary sheriff assigned to the small (fictional) town of Normal, Minnesota. The name alone should have been a warning.
Calling a town “Normal” is like naming a boat in a disaster movie after Poseidon, the angry sea god. It is tempting fate. Ulysses arrives looking for a quiet posting. He has baggage, personal problems and the general expression of a man who has spent years making terrible decisions and is now being punished with municipal employment.
Normal appears to be one of those sleepy American towns where everyone knows everyone, nobody locks their doors, and the local diner probably serves something called “The Lumberjack Surprise.”
Naturally, something is deeply wrong in Normal.
The town’s inhabitants are odd. The local power structure is suspicious. People say things that sound friendly but feel like threats. Then a bank robbery happens, secrets start leaking out, and the whole place goes from Fargo to Assault on Precinct 13 in the blink of an eye.
The plot becomes increasingly insane, at times things happen just because they need to, but that is part of the appeal.
Normal does not want you sitting there with a notebook asking whether every narrative development is plausible. It wants you to enjoy Bob Odenkirk being punched, shot at, thrown around and forced to deal with increasingly absurd people.
It is essentially a violent episode of Northern Exposure written by somebody who masturbates to Soldier Of Fortune magazine.
Odenkirk’s transformation into an action star remains one of modern cinema’s more entertaining developments. This is the man who spent years playing comedy characters. He was Saul Goodman: the fast-talking, morally flexible lawyer who looked as though he might try to negotiate his way out of a hostage situation by offering everyone discount legal representation.
Then Nobody arrived and revealed that Bob could throw, and take, a punch. Then another. Then several more. Hollywood looked at this and apparently concluded:
“Excellent. Give him a gun.”
In Normal, Odenkirk leans into the Everyman persona. Ulysses is not a muscle-bound super-soldier. He does not emerge from the shower looking like an anatomy textbook. He looks tired. He gets hurt. He falls over. He occasionally appears to be wondering whether he could simply leave and allow somebody else to deal with the madness.
That makes him strangely compelling. Odenkirk’s great skill is that he can be funny without trying too hard. He has that wonderful ability to react to insanity as though it is merely an inconvenience delaying his lunch. He does not swagger like John Wick. Bob Odenkirk enters a room and everyone assumes he is there to discuss a parking permit.
Then the shooting starts.
What Is Wheatley?
Ben Wheatley is one of those directors whose career makes you wonder whether, in place of a brain, he has some kind of cupboard full of strange films that he releases whenever the moon is in the correct phase.
He gave us the deeply unsettling Kill List, the psychedelic madness of A Field in England, the high-rise nightmare of High-Rise and the magnificent gunfight factory known as Free Fire. In among this he directed live-action segments for Modern Toss, and somehow decided to make The Meg 2, a movie that I am convinced is actually a parody.
Wheatley has always possessed a dark and peculiar sense of humour. His films often feature people behaving terribly while the universe watches with the detached amusement of a cat observing a mouse. He’s seemingly impossible to fit into a neat little bracket like some other directors, and this is what makes him interesting. His sensibility is all over Normal.
The violence is brutal but frequently funny. Horrible things happen, and Wheatley frames them with just enough absurdity to make you laugh before your conscience catches up and you feel bad.
There is an almost cartoonish quality to the chaos. People lose things they would rather keep. Plans collapse. Violence escalates. Characters react to disasters with the exhausted resignation of office workers discovering somebody has scheduled another meeting.
Wheatley understands that action can be funny when it is messy. Nobody walks away looking cool. People stumble, panic and they make mistakes. And occasionally they get shot because somebody else is having a very bad day. Or exploded completely.
The supporting cast understands exactly what is being asked of them. Henry Winkler plays Mayor Kibner, bringing his naturally warm and friendly presence to a character who exists in a place where friendliness is increasingly suspicious. Winkler has spent decades being one of the most likeable men in entertainment. He could tell you that your house was on fire and you would probably thank him for letting you know. That makes him ideal for Normal.
Lena Headey appears as Moira, adding her usual ability to make every line sound as though it might be followed by a stabbing. Headey has spent so long playing intimidating women that she could probably order a sandwich and make the entire restaurant apologise.
The rest of the town is packed with strange faces, suspicious motives and people who appear to have been hired because Ben Wheatley needed somebody capable of looking cheerful while standing near a corpse.
Everybody is slightly off. Nobody behaves quite correctly. Which is appropriate because the town itself seems to have been assembled entirely around a single secret.
Normal is not trying to reinvent cinema. It is not a meditation on the human condition. It does not have an important message about the nature of society, although it occasionally looks as though it might before somebody gets hit with something.
This is a lean, fast, violent action comedy designed to entertain. And it does.
The film moves quickly, keeps the jokes coming and refuses to become too self-important. It knows the premise is ridiculous. It knows Bob Odenkirk becoming an action hero is ridiculous. It also knows that watching Bob Odenkirk shoot bad people while looking mildly annoyed is enormously enjoyable.
The film is only around 90 minutes long, which is another reason to celebrate. Modern movies have become terrified of ending before their audience develops a new career.
Normal arrives, causes chaos, shoots several things and leaves. No four-hour director’s cut. No twelve-part streaming prequel. No extended scene explaining the childhood trauma of the town’s accountant.
Just madness. Glorious, violent madness.
Normal is crazy, silly, darkly funny and tremendous fun. It combines the snowy oddness of Fargo, the escalating violence of John Wick and the blackly comic chaos of Ben Wheatley’s best work.
Bob Odenkirk continues to prove that the everyman action hero is not only viable but possibly preferable. We have spent decades watching enormous men destroy buildings. This time, it seems more satisfying to watch a tired bloke who looks like he has just finished a difficult meeting destroy the building instead.
Is Normal perfect? No. It is ridiculous. The plot can feel perfunctory just to usher in the next silly bit. It does occasionally feel like somebody put Fargo, Nobody and an NRA conference into a blender.
But it is funny. It is violent. It is fast. And it is gloriously entertaining for 90 fast-moving minutes.
