Silly “Normal” Delivers the Action

Normal (Ben Wheatley, 2025) 3 out of 5 stars

Though he is now in his sixties, actor Bob Odenkirk has, among other things, successfully pivoted into a new role as action hero in films like the 2021 Nobody and its 2025 sequel. In Normal, from the same screenwriter of that series (Derek Kolstad) and director Ben Wheatley (In the Earth), Odenkirk plays another seemingly ordinary guy thrust into extraordinary circumstances. Wham! Bam! Shotgun man!

We start not on him but in a tense gathering of yakuza (Japanese gangsters) in Osaka, where three underlings are forced by the boss to cut off a finger to make up for a recent mistake. Two complete the task, one does not. Not a smart move; off with his head! The bleeding survivors are told they will now be headed to Normal, Minnesota, where their next gig awaits.

What do the yakuza have to do with Minnesota? Part of the fun of this very silly (and violent) movie is in wondering exactly when we’ll find out, knowing all the while that the prologue must bear some relationship to the plot (don’t worry, it very much does). In the meantime, however, we enter this small Midwestern town in the company of Odenkirk’s Ulysses, an interim-sheriff-for-hire who travels from place to place filling in for missing (dead or retired) chiefs until the next election or appointment. His aw-shucks demeanor endears him to those in charge—including the mayor, played by the Fonz himself, Henry Winkler—though it will soon turn out that there is hard steel beneath the gentle exterior.

Everything comes to a head during a holdup. Two itinerant would-be criminals, Lori (Reena Jolly, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever) and Keith (Brendan Fletcher, Violent Night), make the ill-fated decision to rob Normal’s one bank, and then suddenly the guns come out; lots of them. Bullets and more fly everywhere, and we understand why we began in Japan.

The best parts of Normal are the fight choreography and occasionally very clever shoot-em-ups. My favorite is a scene in a bar where we think peace has finally been achieved, only for a detail planted earlier to resurface and relaunch the mayhem. Anchored by Odenkirk’s steady and appealing presence, the movie is a lot of fun, as long as you don’t mind the blood and guts.

Other actors lend their considerable talents to the project, as well, among them Ryan Allen (Ordinary Angels), Lena Headey (9 Bullets), Billy MacLellan (Hailey Rose), Jess McLeod (It’s a Wonderful Knife), and Peter Shinkoda (Prisoner of War). At some point, things stop making much sense, though Ulysses’ recurring voicemails to his estranged wife act as expositional voiceover to explain that which we might miss. It’s a heavy-handed technique, but we’re here for the adrenaline rush, and on that front, Normal delivers.

Christopher Llewellyn Reed

Chris Reed is the editor of Film Festival Today. A member of both the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and the Washington DC Area Film Critics Association (WAFCA), and a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic, Chris is, in addition, lead film critic at Hammer to Nail and the author of Film Editing: Theory and Practice.