From the moment someone in Nobody 2 (United States, 2025) says the boat the characters will take for a river ride “is like a bus, but it floats,” you can predict what’s coming. Or not, if you haven’t seen the first Nobody ( USA, 2021).
The bus mention alludes to the most iconic sequence from the first film, where retired assassin turned family man Hutch Mansel (Bob Odenkirk) finally snaps and uses his skills to tear apart a group of thugs aboard a passenger bus. In the sequel, we’re warned of the same thing: Hutch will do the same to a new group of bad guys, now on a boat.
Is it the most original? Not necessarily. Is it still fun? Absolutely. Nobody 2 is a sequel that takes itself much less seriously than its predecessor. On one hand, this keeps things very entertaining, despite a certain lack of freshness. But on the other hand, it’s worth questioning whether this franchise will follow the same path as others, condemned to merely self-parody until it runs out of steam.
What’s it about?
After facing the Russian mafia, Hutch Mansel (Bob Odenkirk) has been left deeply in debt and must work long hours as an assassin for “The Barber” (Colin Salmon). This has created tension with his wife (Connie Nielsen) and children (Gage Munroe and Paisley Cadorath), so he decides to organize a vacation to the water park where he had his best childhood memories.
However, when they have a brief altercation, they discover the town is run by a violent criminal organization and a nest of police corruption. The situation escalates and once again, Hutch must use his violent talents to protect his family.
Nobody 2: Between Sequel and Self-Parody
With Hollywood sequels, there seem to be only two paths: either make things bigger or, as happens more frequently these days, do the same thing but with references to or even mockery of what came first. Nobody 2 follows this second route with the enthusiasm of someone who has decided to treat life as a joke.
The premise is essentially that of a man who can’t escape either his past or his apparent hereditary vocation for beating up bad guys, not even to avoid ruining his vacation. Family heritage and legacy is a theme the film introduces, but doesn’t develop beyond a couple of dialogues about how Hutch has followed in his father’s (Christopher Lloyd) footsteps, and how he doesn’t want his son to do the same. The sequel falls right into that trap by repeating, from its initial sequence, almost identical jokes.
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However, there’s no greater exploration in Nobody 2 than self-referential callbacks to its predecessor in a mocking sense. If things were absurd but with a slight touch of tragedy in the first part, here it fully embraces the former. Hutch deals with blowing up some guys with the same regretful expression as someone who forgot to take out the trash.
And in general, that absurdity provokes laughter if you don’t think about it too much. What in the first film was a brutal and meaty climax inside a workshop, here is a massacre in a water park, with the same joy and sadism as Home Alone. Of course it will be funny to see octogenarian Christopher Lloyd spraying anonymous criminals with a machine gun. And of course the gratuitous and unexplained appearance of Hutch’s brother, Harry (RZA), now a full-fledged sword master, will elicit laughs. A stupid deus ex machina, but one that amuses precisely because it’s aware of how absurd it is.
However, watching Nobody 2, it’s impossible not to think that Hollywood proposals that were once moderately innovative seem resigned not only to repeating themselves, but to making fun of themselves. There’s no character progression, merely self-parody. You don’t need to look further than M3GAN 2.0 (USA, 2025), a sequel that abandons horror for comedy and builds itself on jokes about the most absurd aspects of its original premise.
In the case of this sequel with Bob Odenkirk, taking things less seriously helps, at least, to make the experience fun. The direction, now handled by Indonesian filmmaker Timo Tjahjanto, delivers combat sequences as frenetic as they are comical. However, it’s inevitable to feel that there’s wasted potential. The world of Nobody hides a story about the tedium of suburban married life and the fascination with violence, but we wouldn’t get an exploration of that even in a hypothetical third installment.
Nobody 2 is now in theaters.
