He’s On Vacation

Released in 2021, Nobody came along as a kind of answer to John Wick. A retired guy who clearly had a particular set of skills, and who had ties to a shady underworld that was barely defined but clearly had its own rules, Nobody played in the same kind of pond as John Wick, but it did so without trying to be so cool about it. The film’s hero was just some guy, it seemed. A father, a husband, someone that you wouldn’t pick out of a crowd. And yet he could fight, and kill, and do it all with skill and aplomb. He was John Wick without the allure, which is what made him interesting.

The film, directed by Ilya Naishuller and written by Derek Kolstad, went on to make $57.5 Mil against a budget of $16 Mil, which made it a qualified success. Not huge numbers, but profitable enough that the possibility of a sequel wasn’t off the table. Four years later, that sequel came out in August of 2025 and then left theaters, seemingly, almost as quickly as it arrived. Made on a budget of $25 Mil, the film only made back $41 Mil, making it far less successful, for far more expense, than its predecessor. So what happened? Why did the sequel that fans said they wanted shrivel up at the Box Office?

The answer probably stems from two things. The first is that this sequel doesn’t really say anything new about the character. Many of the beats of the film mirror those of the original, with the film seemingly having an ethos of, “do the same thing all over again.” And that illustrates the second issue with the film: there really isn’t much more story you can give to the main hero of the film because all of his story already happened. When you can’t say or do anything new, all you can do is more of the same, and the film has to nail that to be really good. Audiences, it seems, didn’t feel like Nobody 2 had the right formula to be worthy of their time.

Four years after the events of the first film, we find Hutch Mansell (a returning Bob Odenkirk) working for The Barber as his go-to hitman for hire. After Hutch burned the Russians’ money at the end of the first movie, the Barber stepped in and paid the debt, but that’s a debt that Hutch has to pay back by working for the Barber until it’s all done. That means constant missions, all the time, which has taken Hutch away from his family. There’s a distance growing again, with his kids barely paying attention to him and his wife on the verge of asking for a divorce. What’s a guy to do?

Go on vacation, apparently. Remembering that his dad, David (Christopher Lloyd), once took him and his brother to Plummerville, WI, to a water park for a week as a family vacation, Hutch decides to take his family to the same water park to spend a week together. But almost immediately Hutch finds trouble in the form of the local Sheriff, Abel (Colin Hanks). It seems that Abel is a dirty cop who helps oversee the criminal elements in town, all under the control of Lendina (Sharon Stone), and once Hutch crosses them, Abel and Lendina won’t let it go. The only way to stop the bad guys from messing with his family is to do what he does best: light fires and kill anyone that gets in his way.

A big issue with Nobody 2 is the fact that it doesn’t have anything new to say. To start, the story is a pretty massive repeat of the first film. Hutch has seemingly grown distant with his family and doesn’t know how to fix it. He finds himself enmeshed in a criminal conspiracy he didn’t want anything to do with, burns some money, pisses off the local bad guys, and in the end pulls a kind of Home Alone with a series of tricks and traps at a location he’s familiar with. The bad guys die, the authorities scoop him up but then let him go, and Hutch goes back to his life having found a way to connect with his family once again (because violence). If you put one film over the other you could quite literally trace the way the machinations of the plot lined up one-to-one.

I think this happened because the writers on the film, a returning Derek Kolstad joined by Aaron Rabin, didn’t really know how to push Hutch forward. Instead of putting Hutch further forward in his career with the unnamed agency he works for, or having him strike out on his own as a new kind of agent, the writers decide to hit the recent button. Yes, he’s now an active agent, but in all the ways that matter he’s back where he started at the end of the first Nobody. It’s easier to repeat beats than try something new, and Nobody 2 seems averse to the idea of doing anything new, to a comical degree. It actively wants to give us more of the same because that’s what worked the first time around. Second time’s the charm, right?

Surprisingly, in some ways that actually is the case. While I didn’t like the fact that the film seems so set on repeating the beats of the first film, I had to admit that Nobody 2 was still pretty enjoyable, and that’s all thanks to two key factors. The first is Bob Odenkirk, who is so good at playing Hutch. He has the right blend of down-on-his-luck, put-upon charm that makes Hutch seem like a nice, normal, everyday guy. But then he can turn on a switch, let his eyes flash, and you see the killer within. It’s a solid performance that easily carries this film, much like it carried the previous one, and you understand why they feel like Hutch could carry many, many more films to come. He just works.

The second factor is that the film is loaded with great action. Sure, the plot is threadbare and a slavish repeat of the first film, but the action is anything but repetitive. There are so many great new sequences, from an elevator fight early on, to a hugely violent four-on-one brawl on a duck boat, and then the grand finale at the water park, that all show a level of care and style you’d expect from the production team. David Leitch, who also worked on the John Wick films, produces this one as well and his keen eye for action choreography carries through once again. This is a solid, hard-hitting, bone crunching action film that delivers everything you want with a solid level of creativity.

But is that enough to carry a film that is, otherwise, creatively bankrupt? That is where I struggle. I like that the film comes up with a new location with new villains all so Hutch can do his thing. It would have been nice, though, if we could have gotten the Plummerville storyline without having to retread so much of the storyline from the first film. We don’t need to see Hutch trying to reconnect with his family again. We don’t need to see him try to be a good guy and then slide into his violent side again. We really should be able to get into all this action without the film repeating everything that worked in the first film hoping it’ll work again. It was great once, but only cute the second time, and if, somehow, this series manages to get a three-quel, it will be tiresome if we have to see all the same beats reheated yet again.

I liked Nobody 2 but that’s despite the fact that it basically had nothing new to say. Hutch was a fantastic character and his first adventure in Nobody was a shocking breath of fresh air. But now that the shock has worn off this retread feels stale, not fresh. Hutch is a great character that could easily get dropped into a number of fun scenarios. If we do see a third film, I hope the creative team actually uses their creativity and does something fresh with him and his world. More of the same isn’t going to cut it anymore.