The premise of Normal, the latest film from Ben Wheatley, sounds incredibly promising. A snowbound neo-western from the director of Free Fire and Kill List and co-written with John Wick and Nobody scribe Derek Kolstad, it emerges as a curious hybrid of Assault on Precinct 13, The Last Stand, and Hot Fuzz, with characteristically fluid fight scenes, but anyone expecting the wit and humour of Wheatley’s own scripts is going to be disappointed.
Bob Odenkirk plays the improbably named Ulysses Richardson, a laid-back sheriff temporarily assigned to the small Minnesota town of Normal. Initially turning a blind eye to some suspicious activities in the town, he soon begins to suspect that something isn’t quite right in this seemingly quiet town, and that his predecessor’s death may not have been as clear-cut as it originally appeared. When a botched bank robbery uncovers a cache of Yakuza gold, Ulysses must scramble to escape Normal with his life.
Structurally, the film feels like three separate ideas awkwardly stitched together. None of these sections is entirely without merit, but the film never settles on what it wants to be. It would have benefited from just picking a lane, especially when the runtime is only 90 minutes. As such, it feels both overstuffed and insubstantial. A lot happens, but very little of it carries any weight. The film is strongest in the first half, where Wheatley plays his cards closer to his chest. The script does a decent job sowing seeds of intrigue along the way, establishing lots of little set-ups that pay off further down the line.
This culminates in a haphazardly planned bank robbery, which is dripping with tension, but which dissipates the moment the protagonists leave the bank. From here, Normal turns into a town siege as the protagonists try to shoot their way out of the town, leading to a string of gory deaths, which are invariably played for laughs. Wheatley and Kolstad seem more interested in the spectacle of killing off characters in over-the-top ways and tightly choreographed fight scenes, rather than sustaining any kind of suspense. The one-on-one fights are brilliantly conceived and performed, but this tonal uncertainty is one of the film’s biggest problems.
Much of the cast performs as though they’re in a dark comedy, but it’s rarely funny. Lines are frequently delivered with the cadence of jokes or badass one-liners, only to land with a thud. It’s silly but not funny, a mixture that quickly wears thin. There are bright spots. Henry Winkler brings some much-needed personality to the town in his all-too-brief performance as the town’s cheerfully corrupt mayor. He seems to be the only actor who fully embraces the silliness of the premise, reeling off empty platitudes and repeatedly eulogising the previous sheriff with the prosaic line, “He was a son of a bitch, but he was our son of a bitch.” It’s a neat way to mark him as an insincere character, and hints at a more self-aware film that never really emerges.
In supporting roles, Jess McLeod gives the most interesting performance as the daughter of the previous sheriff, with a trans-identity subplot that’s handled with surprising sensitivity, in a brief bit of dialogue that works better than any amount of exposition. Lena Headey really sinks her teeth into her throwaway bartender role, while Billy McLellan and Ryan Allen are fun as the two deputies, one ambitious, one hapless. The running joke with McLellan’s squeaky leather jacket is one of the few that works really well, although the payoff is clumsily handled. Generally speaking, though, the characterisation is frustratingly thin. Characters are built up as significant, only to be dispatched unceremoniously or as a joke. It’s difficult to care about any of the characters when they are all so venal and corrupt.
Odenkirk himself remains watchable throughout. His weary, understated presence works best in the early scenes, where Ulysses is presented as a quietly observant outsider underestimated by the town’s power brokers, who mistake his unassuming nature for lazy apathy. His shift into action-hero mode is less convincing, not because Odenkirk can’t handle the physicality (Nobody proved this) but because the film gives him little introspection or regret, as he guns down people he has lived alongside for the last few months. Because he’s played by Odenkirk, Ulysses himself is always likeable, but the film itself treats the deaths as a joke. He dispatches townspeople with mechanical efficiency, but without the moral weight that might have made it interesting.
The exposition-heavy voiceover feels laboured and by-the-numbers, spelling everything out and leaving little room for ambiguity, and Odenkirk himself sounds tired relaying it. The action set-pieces are exhilarating in isolation (especially the two fight sequences in the hardware store and the heberdashery) and just as assured as those in Kolstad’s other films, but they lack the wit of the films it’s emulating. While Hot Fuzz has fun with the idea of national treasures attempting to kill our heroes and getting blown up for their trouble, this one doesn’t have this charm, and it quickly becomes a little tiresome and repetitive. At least in Edgar Wright’s film, when yet another village elder is revealed to be part of the conspiracy, Wright and Pegg have the good sense to make a joke out of it. Normal feels like that film played straight, which is not something that works particularly well.
It’s not so much that Normal is terrible; there are flashes of wry humour, and the fight scenes at least are choreographed creatively, and with a real sense of fun. It’s more than that; it just never feels like a Ben Wheatley film. At all. Much like The Meg 2, it has the feel of a director-for-hire job, lacking the dry wit and personality that once defined the British filmmaker’s efforts. Hopefully, this is a “one for them, one for me” type deal, because the high of Kill List is getting harder to remember.
★★
In UK cinemas on May 15th / Bob Odenkirk, Lena Headey, Henry Winkler, Billy McLellan / Dir: Ben Wheatley / Vertigo Releasing / 15
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