Review: 'Nobody' casts Bob Odenkirk as a convincing assassin trying to live a quiet suburban life.

Who would have guessed, back when we were all watching “Mr. Show,” that comic actor Bob Odenkirk would turn out to be such a badass — as evidenced by his work in “Better Call Saul” and now in the surprisingly action-packed thriller “Nobody.”

Here, Odenkirk plays Hutch Mansell, who’s droning through what looks to be a boring suburban existence. He works as an accountant in a small factory, taking abuse from the owner, Eddie (Michael Ironside), and Eddie’s full-of-himself son, Charlie (Billy MacLellan). At home, Hutch is disrespected by his teen son, Blake (Gage Munroe), and regarded with quiet resignation by his wife, Becca (Connie Nielsen). Only his little girl, Abby (Paisley Cadorath), seems to dote on him.

When two masked thieves break into the house, Hutch momentarily prepares to deck one with a golf club, but seems to lose his nerve. Later, though, when he discovers Abby’s prized kitty-cat bracelet is missing, Hutch seems to snap — and he goes looking for the thieves, deploying skills that suggest Hutch hasn’t always been a mild-mannered bean counter.

It’s only a short hop from Hutch’s pursuit of the thieves to a fight against six thugs on a city bus. Hutch takes a few licks — and it’s cool how director Ilya Naishuller (“Hardcore Harry”) finds drama in how Hutch can take a punch — but puts the thugs in the hospital. What Hutch doesn’t know is that one of the thugs is the brother of Yulian Kuznetsov, the flamboyantly violent head of the local Russian mob. (Yulian is played by Alexey Serebryakov, star of the acclaimed Russian drama “Leviathan.”)

The firepower of “Nobody” comes from three men: Odenkirk, who is dynamic doing a slow burn and unleashing Hutch’s fury; Naishuller, who stages fight scenes brimming with menace; and screenwriter Derek Kolstad, who creates the same man-against-the-world fury as he did writing the original “John Wick.”

Where “Nobody” falls short is in the atmosphere surrounding Hutch’s swatch of barely justifiable destruction. There’s little explanation of Hutch’s past deeds, no sense of a larger world where such violence is part of the life. In “John Wick,” Kolstad set Keanu Reeves’ Wick amid an army of baddies, and created a venue — the no-kill zone of The Continental hotel — that prompted as much curiosity as Wick himself. “Nobody” doesn’t anything like that, and the absence is deeply felt.

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‘Nobody’

★★★

Opens Friday, March 26, in theaters where open. Rated R for strong violence and bloody images, language throughout and brief drug use. Running time: 92 minutes.