89 minutes, opens on Aug 21

★★★★☆

The story: Three years after the events of Nobody (2021), the Mansell family have returned to their daily suburban routine. To heal rifts within his family, Hutch (Bob Odenkirk) takes everyone, including his father David (Christopher Lloyd), to a vacation spot he liked as a child – Wild Bill’s Majestic Midway and Waterpark. But when his children are bullied by the locals, Hutch has to decide what kind of man to be. A normal guy who avoids conflict, as his wife Becca (Connie Nielsen) urges him to be, or the father who uses his training as an assassin to protect his family?

The first movie was a riotous origin story based on the corny idea of the man who has forsaken violence, only for violence to find him. This awakens his special set of skills, with the villains discovering too late that they have messed with the wrong guy.

A hoary old premise it may be, but it was given fresh life by boldly imagined fight scenes, a sprinkling of absurdist comedy and, most all, animated by the idea of a grudge – one held by a Russian mobster eager for revenge, the other held by Hutch, a dad protecting his family.

The idea of a personal beef is put to good use again in the sequel, after Hutch’s children earn the unwanted attention from the local yokels who run the amusement park in which the family is vacationing.

But Hutch – who can be justifiably called John Wick: Suburban Dad Edition – cannot be expected to use his extensive government-trained talents against a bunch of small-town thugs.

This is where mob boss Lendina comes in. As portrayed by American actress Sharon Stone, she is operatically evil – a villainess out of the Mad Max (1979 to 2024) film universe, or from a South-east Asian work of horror or action, and nothing like the grounded bad-guy Russians from the first movie.

Sharon Stone as Lendina in Nobody 2, directed by Indonesian film-maker Timo Tjahjanto.

PHOTO: UIP

Lendina’s unhinged persona could be the influence of Timo Tjahjanto, who replaces the original’s director, Russian film-maker Ilya Naishuller.

Tjahjanto, a member of the New Indonesian Extreme wave of film-makers, is behind modestly budgeted but popular hits, including the horror film May The Devil Take You (2018) and its 2020 sequel, and the Netflix martial arts thriller The Shadow Strays (2024), both originally in Indonesian. Nobody 2 marks his major studio debut and first film in English.

The mild satirical fun that Naishuller put into Nobody is there in the sequel. Viewers get the sense that Hutch is tired of the nonsense that the townsfolk are putting him through, because it is all so cliched.

It is why it feels so satisfying when baddies are subjected to Nobody 2’s M18-rated violence. They do not simply get knocked out or peppered with bullets. In set pieces that blend physical comedy with wince-inducing violence, skulls are split with katanas and eyes are pierced with sharp objects.

This movie, after all, comes from the same producers as John Wick Chapters 3 and 4 (2019 and 2023) and the spin-off Ballerina (2025) and others in the genre of movies that place importance on the quality, not just the quantity, of martial arts action.

Hot take: Nobody 2 takes the action up a notch, providing plenty of satisfying, vengeance-fuelled showdowns.

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