Review: ‘Normal’ is dadcore action at its most familiar
2026 / Dir. Ben Wheatley
Rating: 3/5
Watch if you like: Marge Gunderson in Fargo if she was played by John Wick, but Keanu Reeves had to drop out so they got Bob Odenkirk.
Rejoice, divorced dads of America: Father’s Day has come early this year, thanks to this here new Bob Odenkirk movie about a broken man who finds his groove again by blowing gooey chunks out of a small midwestern town’s residents, one bullet at a time. Though it’s not an official Nobody sequel—even though it was also written by Derek Kolstad (John Wick 1-3) and has a way too similar sounding name, and I definitely told the AMC employee I was there to see Nobody—it scratches an all-too-similar itch.
Odenkirk plays Ulysses, a sadsack interim sheriff of the town of Normal, Minnesota. Since a traumatic shooting derailed his previous career and the aftermath caused his wife to leave him, he’s made a go of it filling in like a substitute teacher at small-town police stations. The town of Normal seems ripped straight out of the Coen Brothers’ Fargo, rather than establishing its own small-town quirks. What jumps out for Ulysses is the police station’s massive armory of military-grade equipment and even the local diner being outfitted with armed weaponry as wall decor.
As audience members, we’ve already been tipped off that something’s amiss because the film actually opens in Osaka with a group of yakuza goons undergoing a grisly penance ritual to their leader before being sent to Normal. It’s a startling opening that nobody would expect and a really bonkers idea of having yakuza infiltrate the Midwest, but by the time we get to see a fleet of yakuza descend on Normal, we’ve had too much time to simmer in the idea when it could have been a wild, late-movie twist.
Anyway, the film is divided pretty evenly into two parts. The first is with Ulysses interacting with the quirky townsfolk (Henry Winkler doesn’t get much screen time but is fun as the town’s mayor) and noticing all the subtle things that are wrong. Odenkirk plays Ulysses like his character from Nobody, and while he can do mildly depressed well, there’s a feeling that he’s being underutilized.
The film also peppers in some issues-of-the-day window dressing in this first section—American economic collapse, police trauma, small-town bigotry—without really much to say about any of them. Most notable is the character of Alex (Jess McLeod), the child of the late sheriff who died under mysterious circumstances, who drinks their problems away. It’s implied Alex has been ostracized by the town because of their gender identity, but Normal, frustratingly, can’t bring itself to state this explicitly, perhaps to maintain a broader appeal. On the one hand, it’s cool that they cast a nonbinary actor for the role—and part of the film is about them getting justice against the town—but the message is so undercut by its lack of specificity that it feels more like a pat on the back than an actual subversive act.
The second part of Normal is a balls-to-the-wall shootout starting with a foiled bank robbery, pulling the curtain back on the town’s links to the yakuza, which then turns the town’s locations like the knitting shop and the hardware store into death traps for Ulysses and his allies. It’s actually quite an effective move, taking the familiarity and comfort that’s been established and subverting it, even when we’ve already been tipped to the dangers lurking behind the Fargo veneer.
Odenkirk’s character is supposed to be more of an everyman here than he was in Nobody, so many of the action scenes can feel toned down. Director Ben Wheatley, who seems more in director-for-hire mode, makes clever use of accidental mishaps and dumb luck to keep Ulysses alive, like signs tipping over to crush someone or finding a cache of dynamite. Certain sequences, like a fight in the hardware store, feel like watered-down John Wick and negatively reinforce that there’s too much here we’ve seen before and better.
That’s not to say this isn’t an entertaining movie. I will absolutely be rewatching this with my dad, and I recommend you do the same. Despite its theatrical release, the film feels made for streaming algorithms. It’s a John Wick meets Fargo mashup that still works because those movies are great, not because Normal is going out of its way to do anything special.