Your Average Ironically Average Title

I kept seeing Bob Odenkirk's face in the thumbnail for 2026's Normal on Amazon Prime and I kept wondering, "Why is it showing me this? Didn't I already see it a couple years ago?" But the movie I was thinking of was Nobody, another action movie starring Bob Odenkirk and written by Derek Kolstad, creator of the John Wick franchise. With Normal, Kolstad tries to channel a little Fargo energy but it ultimately dissolves into action that feels even less substantial than Nobody and the later John Wick movies.

Odenkirk plays Ulysses, who's separated from his wife, Penny, presumably short for Penelope, because, yes, this is an Odyssey reference. He comes to the small town of Normal, Minnesota to be an interim sheriff after the town's previous sheriff mysteriously died ice fishing in his underwear. He meets a series of quirky characters and establishes himself as a friendly, easy going guy who leaves a ticket on a local bartender's car parked in a red zone--a ticket that turns out to merely contain a note; "Park better." The bartender is played by Lena Headey whose role in this film is sadly smaller than her billing suggests.

Then there's a bank robbery perpetrated by a nice young couple Ulysses had met earlier in the film and, one thing leads to another, and he's sided with them in a gun fight against all the deputies and seemingly the entire rest of the town's population. All because there's a vault in the bank containing yakuza gold.

Yes, the yakuza. The film begins with a prologue in Osaka in which a yakuza boss sends a subordinate, played by Peter Shinkoda, who also played the yakuza guy on Daredevil, to run things in Normal, which is apparently a stateside location for the outfit's money laundering. The rest of the movie is a long action sequence.

Kolstad and Odenkirk came up with the concept together. I like the concept but it's a shame Odenkirk didn't write the screenplay because, goddamn, Kolstad cannot write dialogue. Ulysses has a voice over narration in the form of voice mails he leaves for Penny in which he explains that Normal is so boring that he spends a lot of time saying, "Nothing to see here." Someone should have explained to Kolstad that police generally don't have to say that unless there is something to see. But I won't spoil the dumbest moment, which is an extremely awkward exchange of dialogue that ushers Lena Headey out of the movie.

The attempts to inject the story with local colour never feel more than derivative at best. There's a moose wandering around town that mostly just made think, "Oh, they saw Northern Exposure." I like seeing Bob Odenkirk, though.

Whew. I got through the whole review without mentioning Twin Peaks.

Normal is available on Amazon Prime.