Jonah Naplan   August 15, 2025

Action sequels are rarely as good as the original. Though they may go bigger and more extravagant, they don’t often match what made their predecessor a hit. This is the case with “Nobody 2,” an unnecessary follow-up that stretches the central gimmick of the first movie—Bob Odenkirk, a typically comedic actor, is playing an action star, how ridiculous!—far too thin. It’s got a couple of fun sequences and entertainment value all around, but director Timo Tjahjanto’s attempts to retain the novelty of that 2021 movie are largely unsuccessful. Odenkirk’s having fun as usual, but even he seems to be running on fumes.

If “Nobody” tracked Odenkirk’s Hutch Mansell as he shifted from being a family man to an unstoppable killing machine, then “Nobody 2” follows him as he tries to transition from being an unstoppable killing machine back to a family man. He’s away from home all the time, taking assignments from “The Barber” (Colin Salmon) in order to pay off the massive debt he owes after burning a mountain of money in the first movie, and his wife Becca (Connie Nielsen) is getting frustrated, so Hutch decides that he’s going to take his family, including son Brady (Gage Munroe), daughter Sammy (Paisley Cadorath), and dad David (Christopher Lloyd) on a vacation to a little tourist town called Plummerville, centered around water parks and boardwalk arcades. But all cannot be peaceful, of course, lest screenwriters Aaron Rabin and Derek Kolstad actually want to give Hutch a moment to breathe.

Turns out, Plummerville is just a front for an entire interconnected web of criminal activity, overseen by the evil, mysterious Lendina (Sharon Stone), one of those slick-haired, backstabbing villainesses who never really gets into the action herself but will sure commission hundreds of armed, yet largely useless, soldiers to get into it for her. She’s got two right-hand men, Plummerville’s sheriff Abel (Colin Hanks) and the theme park operator Wyatt (John Ortiz) who both realize early on that Hutch is no ordinary tourist the hard way. There’s no such thing as “vacation” for this vigilante, and after a scuffle at an arcade, Hutch begins dispatching assailants with brute force and, inevitably, gets involved with all the local baddies.

The action in “Nobody 2” is largely competent if forgettable when paired against its predecessor. There’s multiple sequences that want to be a new version of something that already exists—a fight on a duck boat, for example (in the case of this movie, it’s a boat with a duck on it), seems to reflect the excellent bus fight scene from the first movie—but are executed with less flair because the novelty is lost. It’s a sequel that follows most of the same beats as the first, including enlisting Hutch’s adopted brother Harry (RZA) to kick ass alongside him in the final action sequence that transforms the waterpark into a warzone, complete with booby traps that turns this movie into something of an R-rated “Home Alone.”

It’s all amusing enough, even if you’re left wanting more from director Tjahjanto and stunt coordinators Greg Rementon, Kyle McLean, and Kirk Jenkins who never fully lean into the bloody phantasmagoria that made the first “Nobody” such a treat. They work so well with Odenkirk, though, who continues to prove he’s game for whatever this material requires of him. He’s particularly funny here, between all the punches and gunshots, and is probably the biggest reason why “Nobody 2” is able to move along at such a brisk pace (at 89 minutes, it feels like a short movie). And yet, you’re still left wondering by the end whether this sequel needed to get made in the first place, and if its occasional charm is incentive enough.

Whatever the answer, there’s no denying that “Nobody 2” is essentially just a rehash of a better movie that isn’t even bold enough to perfectly copy it beat by beat. Christopher Lloyd was one of the most quintessential parts of the first film, yet he’s barely in this one; and for most of the time that he does appear on screen, he’s wearing sunglasses obscuring his face from our view. Nielsen gets so little to do, despite being a major player in the first flick, while the movie seems to want to set up Brady as a sort of Hutch Jr. who gets into fights and doesn’t yet understand how to control himself, but loses sight of that goal when “Nobody 2” reaches its bonkers climax.

There’s nothing here that will make “Nobody 2” stand out among the action ranks, even compared to 2025’s offerings, which is too bad considering all the talent in front of and behind the camera, but the simple fact that it doesn’t really need to exist and that we’ve seen this movie so many times before holds it back. Nobody will think that it’s boring, but nobody will claim it’s something new or different, either.

Now playing in theaters.