DUBAI: Bob Odenkirk continues his transformation into an everyman action hero in this stylish action comedy from English filmmaker Ben Wheatley (“Kill List,” “Rebecca”). Odenkirk plays Ulysses, a lawman haunted by a shooting incident that left him mentally shattered and broke up his marriage. Now, he’s landed a job as interim sheriff in the small — but surprisingly prosperous — town of Normal, Minnesota, after the last sheriff died of hypothermia in a fishing-related mishap.
At first, it seems that Ulysses will have a relatively quiet stint until the next sheriff is elected. The locals all give him a warm welcome, and his new colleagues are eager for him to fit in. But when a robbery at the local bank goes wrong, Ulysses quickly discovers that Normal’s warmth is just a façade covering up a dark secret — one that everyone in town seems to be in on.
Wheatley owes a considerable debt to “Fargo” — both the Coen brothers' 1996 film and its TV spinoff — here, and not just for the Minnesota setting. There’s a similar offbeat, homely vibe to both the cops and the townsfolk in general, and a similar stumbling from relative calm to chaos in the blink of an eye. “Normal,” though, lacks the subtle layers of peak “Fargo,” focusing instead on adrenaline-fuelled action.
In that action, there are shades of Quentin Tarantino’s almost-cartoonish violence, with several gruesome accidental deaths (including a gunshot killing reminiscent of Marvin’s in “Pulp Fiction”) and general senses-overloading mayhem in the film’s many fight scenes.
What keeps “Normal” from spiralling into complete nonsense — though only just — is Odenkirk’s grounding, downbeat presence. He’s supremely effective as the world-weary, traumatized Ulysses, bringing a believable and sympathetic depth to an otherwise ludicrous story that offers few of its actors more than one dimension to work with.
But “Normal” was — presumably — never intended to be any kind of study of the human condition. Instead, Wheatley delivers a slickly packaged, highly stylized, high-octane action film that’s neatly paced and — at a little over 90 minutes — short on the kind of expositional guff that writers so often seem to think these things need. It’s an escapist thrill ride that’s a lot of fun and doesn’t require much input from the viewer — the kind of film you can enjoy and probably never think about again.
