If you’ve been following the career of Bob Odenkirk, you already know that the star of Better Call Saul has become an unlikely kick-ass action hero. Normal, which follows 2021’s Nobody and its 2025 sequel, continues Odenkirk’s foray into big-screen mayhem with a story about the sheriff of a small Minnesota town called Normal.
You needn't know much about irony to guess that the town of Normal won’t be anything like its name.
Clocking in at a brief (by current standards) hour and 30 minutes, Normal spins out a shamelessly improbable plot in which Yakuza gangsters use the town to store part of their American loot. The townsfolk profit, and the mayor (Henry Winkler) wants to keep the funds flowing.
After a prologue set in Japan, director Ben Wheatley moves to Normal, where we meet Odenkirk’s Ulysses, a law officer with a troubled past that uprooted his life and disrupted his marriage.
Having lost his bearings, Ulysses found work as Normal’s “interim” sheriff, an opening created by the previous sheriff's death.
The residents of the small town immediately strike Ulysses (and us) as odd. Moira (Lena Headey), the town's bartender, seems a bit too straightforward. One of Ulysses’s over-eager deputies (Billy MacLellan) wears a leather jacket so squeaky, you can hear him approaching. Another deputy (Ryan Allen) wants to be the next full-time sheriff. Ulyssses also meets the late sheriff’s daughter (Jess McLeod), a troubled young woman.
After about half an hour of goofing on small-town USA, Wheatley gets around to the movie’s point: comic violence that mixes laughter and revulsion. The slaughter begins when a couple of thieves (Reeana Jolly and Brendan Fletcher) try to rob the local bank.
A twist that shifts rooting interests makes for a nice touch, but Normal isn't really about taking sides. No, Normal is more about watching the chaos, which is designed to play in a familiar jokey, gross-out key with enough armaments to fight a small war. But wait. That's pretty much what the movie becomes, a small war.
Odenkirk gives his character a core of decency; the rest of the cast resembles cartoon creations, but no one goes to movies such as Normal for deeply explored character development.
Written by Derek Kolstad, who also wrote the Nobody movies, Normal makes no bones about what it is, but I've been down this road too many times to fully embrace another movie that can be likened to a fireworks display -- only with blood.
And if Normal never seems particularly brainy, maybe it's because so many of the town's 1,890 residents have gotten their heads blown off.
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