There were actually a couple decent movies out in theaters this weekend. By that, I mean there were three that caught my eye for one reason or another. Lee Cronin’s The Mummy looked a little too creepy for my tastes. The Christophers, the latest from director Steven Soderbergh and starring Ian McKellen, sounds like the kind of thing I would really dig, but the earliest showing was a little too late in the day for my given my usual Saturday plans. That left the new Bob Odenkirk-starring action-comedy Normal, and the trailer for that looked amusing.
It was also only about 90 minutes long, so if I didn’t like it, I wouldn’t be stuck there too long.
Ulysses (Odenkirk, who also got a story credit) is a temporary sheriff, the guy who comes into town when the regular sheriff can’t to basically fill-in, do the paperwork, and then leave when whatever brings him to town is over. He’s estranged from his wife, but his calls to her voicemail allow for a decent enough reason to explain what’s going on. As it is, his latest job is in Normal, Minnesota, a small town in the middle of nowhere, and currently in the middle of winter, taking over for eight weeks until the new sheriff election takes place–one of the deputies (Ryan Allen) currently the likely winner–after the death of the previous occupant of the office. Ulysses is pretty hands-off, preferring to handle things with conversation and rubber-stamping things that come across his temporary desk. Even when the mayor (Henry Winkler) offers him a chance to stay, he’d maybe rather not.
The thing is, Ulysses was a county sheriff before the thing that eventually drove a wedge into his marriage sent him on the road, so he is somewhat observant about things like how heavily armed the police station and a lot of the residents are considering how small a town this place is. However, before he can act on those suspicions, an alarm goes off when some out-of-towners try to rob the local bank. There’s something in there that no one in town wants the pair (Reena Jolly and Brendan Fletcher) to see, and when Ulysses ignores the advice of deputies to just hang back and let them take care of things all guns a’blazin’, Ulysses soon finds himself in a situation where everyone in town seems to want him dead, and the only allies he has are the two bank robbers who know about as much as what’s going on as he does. Can Ulysses get himself out of this mess?
Let me start by saying this movie, given the 90 minute run-time, takes its time a bit getting to the action scenes. To be sure, there are some good ones on display, but they come only after a good deal of set-up and character development for Ulysses. He’s a good man, haunted by something that went horribly wrong that still has him waking up from nightmares. There’s nothing really wrong with that, but this isn’t Die Hard where the action starts within what feels like the first ten minutes of the movie and then never lets up. Normal takes its time getting there, and this really is a vehicle for Odenkirk’s brand of action movie, putting it in a similar vein to the two Nobody movies. That means that the movie largely has Winkler and Lena Headey making what amounts to extended cameos, and I think the movie does make good use of Winkler’s screentime at least.
However, I can’t quite bring myself to recommend this one. It’s not bad or anything, but I also think it’s fine to wait for streaming or cable for this one. There are a couple moments where I get the impression that the movie is setting up something for later, like a bullet trick Ulysses knows, that then doesn’t really materialize. While the movie never overstayed its welcome or anything along those lines, it also never quite reached the level of insanity that the aforementioned Nobody movies hit. As a one-and-done, Normal is fine, but there wasn’t much to Ulysses as a character that made me think I needed to see more of his adventures as an interim sheriff in another messed-up town.
Grade: C+
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