‘Normal’ Review: Bob Odenkirk Gets His John Wick On, Again, in Gonzo Crime Caper

Imagine Fargo if Frances McDormand’s Marge Gunderson were sadder, a little smarter, and willing to blow up William H. Macy’s Jerry Lundegaard with a stick of dynamite and you have a pretty good idea of what to expect from Ben Wheatley’s Normal. The main difference between the Coen brothers’ classic crime thriller and Ben Wheatley’s latest, as written by John Wick franchise creator Derek Kolstad, comes from how much it capitalizes on Bob Odenkirk’s recent trajectory as the most unlikely action hero since Liam Neeson.

Ulysses Richardson (Bob Odenkirk) takes a temporary assignment in the titular Minnesota town as its sheriff. His time in Normal is spent handling mostly small-town problems like breaking up fights at hardware stores and putting people in jail cells to sleep off their drunkenness. Normal is a pretty boring place, all things considered. Surely, it’s just a coincidence that every shop seems armed to the teeth, the previous sheriff died under mysterious circumstances, and there’s multi-million-dollar renovations happening in this place nowhere near the Twin Cities. Right?

Everything’s running pretty smoothly for Ulysses until he gets called to assist with de-escalating a bank robbery, and suddenly, everyone in town starts emptying their clips at him more than at the robbers themselves. Turns out, the people of Normal are hiding a deep dark secret, one that even the most tranquil townies seem keen to protect with heavy military weaponry hiding under a shallow veneer of Minnesota Nice by any means necessary.

There’s probably a version of Normal that’s just wall-to-wall gunfights all the way until Ulysses hilariously takes on the town’s mayor (Henry Winkler). The latter very much happens here, but as Wheatley is a more patient action director than his peers, and Odenkirk—who’s also credited with developing the story—is able to bring pathos to any role he gets his hands on, so we get a film with a more thoughtful underpinning than your average 87Eleven bullet storm.

Odenkirk, doubling down on the volatility of his performance in Nobody, flits back and forth between taciturn badass and genuinely kind-hearted bear in the blink of an eye. Ulysses—a guy running from a big mistake choosing to stand fast against making several others—still cares about the people of his jurisdiction even when they’ve given him every reason not to. Odenkirk makes sure you see this guy’s beating heart through all the explosions he leaves in his wake.

And good lord there are a lot of explosions. Wheatley doesn’t play his hand in the film’s quiet, quirky first act, which makes the moment that bullets start flying startling in the best possible way. A switch flips, and we get a roaring, desperate energy from the 1,800-plus gun-toting residents of Normal that Wheatley sustains for an absolutely breathless midsection. The film barely leaves time to process when the folks we’ve just met minutes prior start getting crushed under snowplows or blown to smithereens by grenade launchers—all still somehow able to inject some of that same “aw shucks” energy as the first act in between the bullets flying.