Normal

Bob Odenkirk and f(r)iends

Ben Wheatley's Normal combines small town atmosphere, propellant bursts of action, and dark comedy. Bob Odenkirk stars as Ulysses, the newly hired interim sheriff of Normal, Minnesota. That an outsider could take on such a job for a mere two months strains credulity, but Normal strives for a canvas of bent reality rather than realism itself. Soon into the film, Ulysses and the audience begin to feel that something sinister is lurking beneath the prairie home exterior of the little burg. An inept bank robbery reveals that the institution was housing yakuza money and that the whole town is on the take. Ulysses and the two hapless robbers (Reena Jolly and Brendan Fletcher) must fight off the entire populace. The town is armed to the teeth and Ulysses takes advantage of the firepower in an extremely violent last act.

Normal was written by Derek Kolstad, the writer chiefly responsible for the John Wick series of films. Mr. Kolstad has written a clever script, thankfully more compact than the operatic Wick films. The action scenes contain more of a Rube Goldberg/ Wile E. Coyote element than in the Wick films and are expertly wrought by Wheatley who has previously displayed his action chops in Free Fire and Meg 2. Kolstad gives Ulysses a voice over narration in the form of phone messages to his estranged wife, Penny (geddit). Odenkirk handles the voice overs with aplomb, but this points to the derivative nature of Kolstad's work. Not derivative of Homer though Kolstad is brainy enough to make shout outs to Dorothy Parker, Breaking Bad, and Old Boy. No, Normal is a Coen brothers tribute, grafting the Homeric allusions of O Brother, where art thou? to the high plains noir of Fargo. There are worse formulas, I suppose, but seasoned cinema goers will have seen it all before.

That said, Kolstad deserves credit for creating varied and striking roles for a compact, B movie format and Wheatley has elicited good performances from Mr. Odenkirk, Ms. Jolly, Mr. Fletcher, Henry Winkler, Lena Headey, Jess McLeod, and Billy MacLellan. Manitoba stands in well for Minnesota and the picture gets points for killing off a beloved character actor halfway through the proceedings. Mr Wheatley's psychedelic dynamism meshes well with Kolstad's askew view of his characters, but with limited results. Novel seems more like a project for hire for Wheatley whose best and most personal works remain the films he has directed in his native England: Sightseers, A Field in England, and In the Earth.