‘Nobody 2’ Review: Timo Tjahjanto Has Fun
In an era where mainstream action films strive for perfection in their aesthetics and intricate fight choreographies, genre artist Timo Tjahjanto stands out among the pack as one who strives for imperfection. The clumsier, messier, and more imperfect the action scene is, the more cathartic, violent, and ultimately engaging the set piece will be for the viewer. None of it is kinetic or “badass,” either. It’s so sickeningly violent that you legitimately feel unwell as you watch limbs being severed in the most ridiculously messy ways. The Shadow Strays, his last feature, is incredibly punishing, not only for its central protagonist (wonderfully played by Aurora Ribero) but also for the audience, who have to sit through almost two and a half hours of demented, perverse violence. Such torture eventually forces them to ruminate on whether all of this bloodletting is necessary for 13 to get to where she wants to go (spoilers: it’s not). It feels weird to see him have fun and let loose with his latest feature and first production within Hollywood, Nobody 2. Tjahjanto has such a clear-headed action philosophy, and one he’s even incorporated in some of his horror pictures, that to see him going from the bleakest, most violent picture of his career to the most playful definitely seems like a massive tonal whiplash. Of course, he’s tried his hand at action comedies before with The Big 4, but that, in my view, was a big failure.
That’s why Nobody 2 feels special. To see him attempt to invigorate his own personality within the Hollywood landscape in a sequel to a COVID sleeper hit with an already established directorial footprint, feels different from his past attempt at a more high-spirited movie. While I loved Ilya Naishuller’s Nobody, I wasn’t clamoring for a sequel… until Tjahjanto’s name was announced as the director for Nobody 2. The prospect of observing him adapt his style to Hollywood filmmaking was enough for me to be morbidly curious about how such a violent, visceral director would operate in these circumstances.
Nobody 2: the story
Thankfully, none of Tjahjanto’s penchant for gore is neutered in this 89-minute sequel, because the film doesn’t need to be as excessively violent as something like Headshot, The Night Comes for Us, or The Shadow Strays. Tjahjanto understands what made Naishuller’s first installment such a surprising and refreshing actioner, and it doesn’t start with the action. It is primarily a character study of Bob Odenkirk’s Hutch Mansell, on the surface, a journeyman father who, in actuality, was secretly a former government assassin. The opening moments of Tjahjanto’s sequel see him knee-deep in repaying an impossible debt to The Barber (Colin Salmon) following the first film’s events, trying (and failing) to juggle both facets of his professional and personal life.
This ensures he’s constantly away from his wife, Becca (Connie Nielsen), and children, Brady (Gage Munroe) and Sammy (Paisley Cadorath), missing the quality time he should theoretically have with them. Instead, he’s mindlessly killing people to repay something that will take decades of his life to get even with his handler. Tired and in desperate need of a break, Hutch tells The Barber that he plans to take a holiday with his family and father, David (Christopher Lloyd), to the resort town he went to with his brother, Harry (RZA), when they were children. However, this town is flowing with corruption, with the theme park owner, Wyatt (John Ortiz), and its sheriff, Abel (Colin Hanks), working hand-in-hand with criminal mastermind Lendina (Sharon Stone) to move illicit material discreetly.
After an altercation at an arcade that began with a misunderstanding, Hutch begins to attract the attention of the corrupt sheriff, who tells him to leave town before he and his family are harmed. That’s where he stumbles upon something he shouldn’t have and is noticed by Lendina, who is introduced in the same deeply psychotic fashion as the first movie’s primary antagonist, Yulian Kuznetsov (Aleksei Serebryakov). She’s completely in her element: killing an entire casino while catching a few bad eggs cheating, at the height of her unhinged power. We immediately know she means business when, just a few scenes later, she asks Abel to kidnap Wyatt’s son, just to remind him who he’s truly working for.
A purely pleasurable genre picture from Timo Tjahjanto
While Stone isn’t in the movie as much as she should be, her scene-chewing presence is enough for us to completely be petrified of her whenever she appears, even when face-to-face with Hutch for the first time during the movie’s climax. We genuinely have full-body chills because none of us has any clue what she’s thinking and how she will rid herself of this “nobody,” who’s causing lots of trouble for her. Narratively, Tjahjanto doesn’t much reinvent the wheel, nor does he develop the relationship between Hutch and his family further than the first. But in the case of a movie like this, it doesn’t matter.
The vacation is simply a framework for the filmmaker to bathe in a succession of action beats, each excitingly tactile and very funny. In fact, in a corpus of purposefully desolate and uncomfortable features, Nobody 2 feels like a breath of fresh air for Tjahjanto, who employs the skills he’s developed in Indonesia in situations that only require fun on his (and the actor’s) parts. As a result, he does what any good director would do in this situation: ensure each member of the cast has their time in the spotlight and craft action with an emphasis on pleasure. We don’t feel punished for seeing baddies get their limbs severed but actively cheer when Hutch boards a waterslide and creates a Final Destination-esque idea for the antagonists to get killed in.
The movie’s climax is essentially a large-scale gorefest where Tjahjanto uses his impulses to kill as many people as he can within the playground of an amusement and water park, complete with a POV gunfight inside a freakin’ waterslide! It’s the most exhilarating image I’ve seen from Tjahjanto’s career, one that puts the entirety of the AmusementForce and Tuberides channels to shame. It’s not as violent as his Indonesian works, but it doesn’t need to be. This is fun, not (complimentary) torture. We want to cheer when we see RZA with a samurai sword as he demonstrates why you should never bring a machete to a katana fight, or even when Connie Nielsen joins in on the fun, to tell Lendina that she should’ve never messed with a Mama Bear.
Final thoughts on Nobody 2
The action should respond to the needs of the picture. Tjahjanto understands this and hopes the audience does too. The fact that the filmmaker kept his clumsy, almost improvisational style intact is the bigger miracle here. None of his vision feels compromised, and he even uses creative editing choices to make some beats feel more impactful, considering how the blood doesn’t flow as freely as it did in The Shadow Strays. It’s as much of a Timo Tjahjanto movie as the first Nobody is entirely Ilya Naishuller’s, whose approach to action artistry did get compromised in the film he ended up making instead of Nobody 2, Prime Video’s Heads of State.
With Bob Odenkirk being just as good as he is in the first and seemingly having more fun acting like Buster Keaton in bravura set pieces where physical comedy comes first in creating action (i.e., the duck boat scene), Nobody 2 manages to surpass Naishuller’s original by simply dialing up the fun.
I didn’t think it would be possible for a Timo Tjahjanto film to be fun, considering how ill I’ve felt after watching each and every one of them. But that’s the joy of a genre filmmaker. You don’t have to be confined to a specific style and generic convention. And as he takes the next step in his ever-exciting career, with Jason Statham in The Beekeeper 2, the possibilities are endless for Tjahjanto to cement himself as a recognized action artist not just in Indonesia, but in Hollywood, one severed limb and crushed body at a time…
Also check out: Highest 2 Lowest: Spike Lee’s Electric Reinvention of the Classic Kurosawa Film
