‘NORMAL’ Is a Hacky Rehash of Decades of Bland Action Movies

Director Ben Wheatley has spent his career making films of all stripes. He has dabbled in cult horror, conspiratorial thrillers, twisty shoot-’em-ups, psychedelic dramas, surreal satires, murderous rom-coms, and schlocky B-movies. But it is within the intersections between genres that his best work lives. Take Kill List, Wheatley’s magnum opus. It begins as a dark crime story and gradually devolves into a truly bone-shaking descent into hell, one with the uncanny ability to lmake it feel like you are witnessing something you should not be seeing. His strongest films thrive on that irreverence toward genre boundaries, shifting effortlessly from one mode to another, catching the viewer off balance to ultimately sweep them off their feet. When that balancing act works, it is electric. When it fails – as it certainly does in Normal – the result feels downright amateurish.

It makes sense then why Wheatley would be drawn to a project like Normal, a genre mashup that on paper plays directly into his strengths. oth tonally and stylistically, Normal most closely resembles Wheatley’s 2016 shoot-’em-up caper Free Fire. Where that film moved with unhinged, feral energy and thrived on an eclectic ensemble, Normal plays like a dulled-down genre mashup, something in the vein of Hot Fuzz meets Rambo, sans the cleverness or the action chutzpah of either of those genre mainstays. It is a film that lives up to its name in the worst way. A hasty, bland action movie that could have been released at any point in the last 40 years.

The story follows Bob Odenkirk’s interim sheriff, Ulysses, a man who has lost his confidence after a traumatic shootout involving a young girl and her father. Since then, his marriage has deteriorated and he has drifted from town to town, filling in for sheriffs who have retired or died. In Normal, Minnesota, it is the latter. He arrives in the wintry small town stepping in after the sudden death of the local lawman. On the surface, the town appears idyllic: a tight-knit community of caring citizens. Its conspicuous wealth raises red flags, and it is not long before Ulysses uncovers that the Yakuza are quietly funding the town’s political and legal infrastructure. The question is why.

It is a potentially juicy premise, but the execution is completely inert. Everything feels broad, familiar, painfully predictable, and – most painfully – confidently headed nowhere of interest. You can likely map out every beat from the setup alone just sitting in the theater. That nothing here feels inspired is at least partially because there is so little that defines this movie, that gives it a personality of its own. Even the casting of Odenkirk as a hapless interim sheriff turned one-man army feels less like a continuation of his late-career action hero pivot and more like outright plagiarism of his previous inspired casting as such.

That lack of personality comes rooted in the fact that Normal – as its title plainly suggest – is entirely two-dimensional. No layers. No themes. No complex characters and no relationships, let alone relationship with any semblance of depth. The film has an abrupt tendency to just kill off characters as a gag, which may seem irreverent but more accurately just exposes how little weight anything and anyone actually carries. No one is rounded or given dimension therefore everyone is disposable: bags of meat standing around delivering lines, waiting to get shot.

The effect is flattening and the film in kind feels both lazy and rehashed, like something we have seen a million times before precisely because we have. It miscalculates the act of tongue-in-cheek because that cheekiness is not built on any discernible genuine affection for this story and its characters. Everything feels weightless because the plot and the characters occupying it are written without weight. If the film does not care about them, why should we?

That hollowness extends to the filmmaking itself, which at times feels surprisingly sloppy from the veteran filmmaker. The editing sags wildly, with one of the film’s most glaring issue being the overuse of ADR, or – for those not in the know – audio recorded in post-production rather than on set. Here, it is deployed with surprising incompetence. Characters speak while facing away from the camera, mouths clearly not moving, as clunky exposition spills out in noticeable voice-over. Clumsy ADR only underscores the weak writing, attempting to paper over problems it probably knows it can’t fix.

The humor part of this action-comedy is broad and often straight-up cringe-inducing, often resulting in crickets at my auditorium. There are a few sparing laughs – and Odenkirk does what he can – but the material is too flat to support it. That same flatness infects everything else. The performances are mostly broad and lifeless, and the action fares even worse. In a post-John Wick world, shoot-’em-ups need kinetic, electric choreography, something with rhythm and intent. This has none. It mistakes sheer volume of gunfire for impact, subbing noise for tension and chaos for craft.

What’s missing throughout the entire production is any sense of design, intention. The best action comedies – think Edgar Wright’s oeuvre – build action set pieces like a joke: built on setup and payoff. There is a musicality to it, a balletic visual precision. Normal has none of that. It is just bullets hitting bodies and things exploding at random, not exhilarating so much as numbing. Odenkirk, who proved through Mr. Show with Bob and David, Breaking Bad, and Better Call Saul that he can balance comedy and pathos with surgical control, is better than this material. But he does not transcend it. He plays to its level, stuck delivering hacky voiceover and throwaway one-liners, with only fleeting glimpses of the nuance he is capable of.

And it all circles back to the script. From Derek Kolstad, the creator of the John Wick franchise, it should be the foundation. Instead, it’s the bedrock of the film’s issues. Everything here is surface. The writing is thin, made of two-dimensional characters, without anything even resembling themes to anchor it. The aforementioned clumsy ADR – deployed to patch over gaps in exposition 1 only draws more attention to how little is actually there on the page.

By the end, Normal does not just feel uninspired, it feels haphazardly assembled. A collection of borrowed ideas, half-formed characters, and secondhand set pieces stitched together without much in the way of purpose or personality. Cheap, rehashed, and ultimately disposable. Even at a lean 84 minutes, it fails this viewerMs fundamental test of having felt justified in spending that time with it. Being normal may mean not standing out in a crowd in many senses, but in a sea of generic action movies, it’s just about the worst thing a film can be.

CONCLUSION: A tired redux of decades of superior action-comedy movies, ‘Normal’ aspires to poke fun at the one-man army subset of the genre but fails to find much of anything interesting or entertaining in the process. Bob Odenkirk does what he can, but this misfire from Ben Wheatley fails him.

D+

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