directed by Ilya Naishuller
written by Derek Kolstad
This is a movie we never got in theaters here in the Philippines; at the time of its global release, March 2021, we were still under strict lockdown. I'm grateful, then, that nearly two years after it came out in theaters, we finally got it on Netflix.
Hutch Mansell (Bob Odenkirk) is living the American dream; he has a nice house in suburbia, he's married to a successful realtor (Connie Nielsen) with whom he has two lovely children (Gage Munroe and Paisley Cadorath), and he has a stable (if boring) job as a bookkeeper in his father-in-law's factory. One night, his home is broken into by two desperate burglars, whom Hutch actually lets go, but when he discovers his daughter's toy missing, something inside him is set off and a part of him that he has long kept hidden comes exploding to the surface. He tracks the burglars down, but when he learns their true circumstances, he knows he cannot take his revenge on them. On the bus ride home, a Russian mobster and his mates hop on the bus and start harassing people, and all hell breaks loose, in more ways than one. To help him out of the mess he finds himself in, Hutch may need help from his brother Harry (RZA) and his dad David (Christopher Lloyd).
As I wrote in the title, this movie, written by John Wick screenwriter Derek Kolstad, essentially takes the premise of the Keanu Reeves-led film about an assassin who comes out of retirement because some Russian mobster kills the dog his late wife gave him and tweaks it a bit to make the assassin a bored suburban dad yearning for the days when he was kicking ass and taking names. Kolstad basically turns John Wick into Bob Parr aka Mr. Incredible, only instead of superhuman strength he has an assassin's consummate skill. Instead of a Russian killing a puppy, the film has a Russian thug and his gang harass a bus full of passengers. Instead of John Wick coming reluctantly out of retirement to right a wrong, Hutch basically yearns to beat the crap out of people (who deserve it) and basically jumps on the first pretext to do so.
The action is realized with the brutality and effective choreography of a John Wick movie, and it's all the more effective because of how convincingly Odenkirk plays the mild-mannered facade that Hutch has adopted to hide the killer lurking underneath. There's a real sense of contrast here. There's also some judiciously-used humor, and anyone sick of the quip-laden Marvel movies can relax; there aren't that many of them here. Still, for all of these trapping the movie can't quite shake the fact that it's a John Wick facsimile at heart.
Fortunately, Odenkirk's performance is honestly what keeps this movie from feeling like an inferior John Wick clone, but the similarities really are a bit too glaring to ignore. Would I see another one? Maybe.
6.5/10
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