Review: 'Nobody 2' puts Bob Odenkirk through more cartoonish violence, and inches him closer to a universe-building franchise

“Nobody 2” is an enjoyably maniacal action movie with a ridiculous body count, following in the path of 2021’s “Nobody” and taking its first steps toward creating a cinematic universe.

Bob Odenkirk returns as Hutch Mansell, who from the outside seems to have two major personality traits: He’s boring in a suburban dad sort of way, and he’s indestructible — both characteristics that come in handy in his chosen work, as a lethal contractor who takes jobs that usually involve lots of killing. He’s working off a debt to a Russian mobster, whose money he torched in the first movie, and his handler, called only The Barber (Colin Salmon), tells Hutch he still has $30 million to go.

Hutch, though, needs a break — not necessarily because of the violence, but because his work has taken him away from his wife, Becca (Connie Nielsen), and their two kids, Brady (Gage Munroe) and Sammy (Paisley Cadorath). He keeps missing family dinners, and watching his kids growing up. So Hutch decides to plan a family vacation.

The place Hutch chooses is Plummerville, Wisconsin, the place his dad (Christopher Lloyd) took a young Hutch and his brother Harry when they were kids. It’s got a water slide, a midway, an arcade and “duck boats” — which Hutch has to explain to his children. What could go wrong?

Let the list begin. First, there are the teen bullies who harass Brady and Abby at the arcade. Followed by the security guards who kick the Mansells out of the arcade, and slap Abby on the back of the head as they leave — which prompts Hutch to go back in and beat the crap out of the bullies and the security goons. That’s how Hutch and Blake wind up in the county lockup, run by Sheriff Abel (Colin Hanks), who’s a nasty, vindictive sort. Turns out, though, that Abel isn’t the big dog in Plummerville. That’s Wyatt Martin (John Ortiz), whose father founded the tourist trap the Mansells are visiting — and Wyatt isn’t happy, because he blames Brady for hurting Wyatt’s son, Max (Lucius Hoyos), a high school baseball star, in his throwing arm.

It only takes Hutch a few minutes, and a lot of deputies and goons to beat up, to learn that Wyatt is answering to an even bigger boss — a ruthless gangster, Lendina, who launders her crime empire’s money in Plummerville.

Lendina is played by Sharon Stone, who hasn’t had a movie role this prominent in a while — and she makes up for the absence with a world-class display of scenery-chewing, full-gonzo, over-the-top menace. 

Director Timo Tjahjanto stages a series of outlandish action sequences, turning Martin’s amusement park into a gauntlet for Lendina’s hired hands to get shot, stabbed and blown up in unusual ways. If you can imagine Wile E. Coyote with an arsenal the size of a medium-sized country, you get the general idea. 

Meanwhile, screenwriters Derek Kolstad (who wrote the original “John Wick”) and Aaron Rabin expand the action to give moments of righteous violence to Nielsen, Lloyd and RZA, who returns as Hutch’s warrior brother, Harry. The script also hints at a larger universe of workaholic contract killers, one that might be explored in future installments.

The possibility of those future installments rests largely on how much rest Odenkirk gets between film shoots. Odenkirk shows a remarkable physicality, and a continued ability to take a fake punch, that give the fight sequences an authenticity that make the ridiculousness seem just plausible enough to make an audience worry about the guy’s health.

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‘Nobody 2’

★★★

Opens Friday, August 15, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong bloody violence, and language throughout. Running time: 89 minutes.

Review: 'East of Wall' is an authentic modern West story of a mother and daughter in crisis, played beautifully by the people who inspired the characters

Writer-director Kate Beecroft’s beautifully shot and tenderly realized drama “East of Wall” is a great example of “high risk, high reward” filmmaking, where a real-life person — someone who’s fascinating in and of themselves — is cast as a lightly fictionalized version of themselves.

The people Beecroft gives that spotlight to are Tabatha Zimiga and her teen daughter, Porshia. Tabatha is a hard-bitten South Dakota rancher, training horses and giving homes to teens who have nowhere else to go. Porshia is friends with many of these teens, and she’s the best rider in the bunch.

In Beecroft’s light polish on reality, Tabatha has been widowed for about a year. The death of her husband, John, is a taboo topic of conversation, though it’s clear that Porshia, who idolizes John, blames Tabatha for his death. Porshia barely talks to Tabatha, who’s trying to pay the bills by selling horses at local livestock auctions — where Porshia can demonstrate her horse-handling skills to make the sale.

That opportunity seems to come in the person of Roy Waters (played by the actor Scoot McNairy), a Texas rancher who makes an offer to buy Tabatha’s ranch and keep her and all of her hands on as employees. To sweeten the deal, Roy takes Porshia on the road to sell horses at livestock barns further away than where Tabatha usually goes.

As the relationship between Tabatha and Porshia grows more tense, Tabatha seeks advice from her own mom, Tracey, who’s a piece of work in herself. Tracey is a moonshine-making hard-ass who readily admits she did a terrible job raising Tabatha, who wound up pretty good in spite of it all. Tracey is played by Jennifer Ehle — a long way removed from playing Elizabeth Bennet in the 1995 miniseries of “Pride and Prejudice” — who gives a quietly intense portrayal of a mom staring her regrets down and coming to terms with them.

Beecroft and cinematographer Austin Shelton, both making their feature debuts, beautifully capture the rough beauty of the South Dakota plains and badlands. They also find similar beauty in the people like Tabatha and Porshia who make their homes there, embodying the land’s uncompromising spirit.

That spirit shines through every moment Tabatha and Porshia are on the screen. Some may dismiss their casting, saying they’re playing themselves — but we all play ourselves every day, for audiences as small as our immediate family. They’re doing it on the screen, for who knows how many viewers, and they triumph in those impressive roles.

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‘East of Wall’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, August 15, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for language throughout. Running time: 98 minutes.

Review: 'Weapons' is a horror thriller that confounds, surprises and keeps the audience off guard as the shocks and drama build

My hope is to live long enough for medical science to understand fully how Zach Cregger’s brain works — because the mind that can devise such head-tripping horror movies as “Barbarian” and his loopy follow-up, “Weapons,” is capable of anything.

“Weapons” begins with an audacious horror premise: At 2:17 a.m. one night, 17 second-graders in a small town got up out of bed, went outside and ran off into the dark. A month later, they were still missing, and the town turns dark from the unexplainable tragedy.

Cregger’s script unfolds the story in chapters, each one focusing on someone affected by this awful disappearance. First up is Justine Gandy (Julia Garner), the teacher whose class all ran into the night. Actually, not all, because one boy, Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher), came to school the next day like normal. Both Justine and Alex endure grilling from the local police, while Justine also hears the taunts of the angry townspeople — one of whom paints “witch” on her car.

After we follow Justine through her unraveling, the next chapter centers on Archer Graff (Josh Brolin), a homebuilder whose son was one of the 17 kids who disappeared. Archer spends his time chewing over the case, rewatching the Ring camera video of his son running away from the house, and occasionally stalking Justine.

Later chapters focus on Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), a cop who used to date Justine; Marcus (Benedict Wong), the principal at the elementary school; James (Austin Abrams), a crack addict Paul arrested at one point; and finally Alex, through which we learn the twists in this mystery.

There’s one more person in this narrative: A figure in a red fright wig who appears in Justine and Archer’s nightmares. She’s played by Amy Madigan, who shows up in the flesh eventually — and leaves a mark as one of the most insidiously terrifying roles the movies have delivered since Freddie Krueger.

Cregger’s script doles out information in measured doses, never giving away too much too soon. And that’s not just with the scares and shocks. Cregger’s handling of character detail is also judicious — a prime example being Justine, who is introduced as a shell-shocked survivor but emerges as a complicated and not entirely likable person, for reasons completely apart from whatever happened to her students.

Cregger takes some big swings, particularly in the depiction of what happened that night at 2:17 a.m. — aided by the perfect disturbing use of George Harrison’s “Beware of Darkness.” But Cregger also finds room for sadness and some disquieting snippets of humor — which make the gory moments pop out even more effectively.

On paper, it sounds like it shouldn’t work — and there are times where Cregger’s ambition almost feels like it’s going to sink the movie. But those moments, a viewer realizes by the end, are designed to knock the viewer off-kilter while Craggier lays the groundwork for the audacious finale that makes “Weapons” one of the most surprising and emotionally devastating movies this year. 

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‘Weapons’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, August 8, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong bloody violence and grisly images, language throughout, some sexual content and drug use. Running time: 128 minutes.

Review: 'It's Never Over, Jeff Buckley' presents the late singer-songwriter in all his contradictions and talent

Documentarian Amy Berg sets a tough assignment for herself in “It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley”: Getting to know, and allowing us to know, the mind and heart of an essentially unknowable person — a singer and songwriter who, had he lived past 30, been a generational voice on par with Dylan or Springsteen.

Jeff Buckley was born in 1966 in Anaheim, California, to a 17-year-old single mom, Mary Guibert. His father, Mary explains in one of the movie’s many illuminating and heartbreaking interviews, left before Jeff was born. His father was Tim Buckley, an acclaimed folk-rock singer and songwriter who was also considered a “once in a generation” talent.

Mary describes the one time Jeff spent time with his father, in 1975, when Jeff was 8 years old. Mary took Jeff to one of his concerts in Los Angeles, and in the dressing room backstage after the show, Tim invited Jeff to stay with him and his second wife for a week. Shortly after that visit, Tim Buckley died of a drug overdose at age 28. Notably, Jeff was not mentioned in Tim’s obituary.

As Mary tells the story, Jeff was always interested in music, and shared some of his father’s gifts — including a five-octave vocal range and a voracious appetite for every kind of music. He also held a measured antipathy for his father’s legacy. Once Jeff became famous, a journalist asked him what he had inherited from his father; Jeff’s acerbic answer was “People who remember my father — next question.”

After several years trying to break into the music industry, in Los Angeles and New York, Jeff’s “big break” came in an unlikely venue: A 1991 tribute concert for his father. He performed one of Tim’s songs, “I Never Asked to Be Your Mountain,” one written for Jeff and Mary — while wearing one of his father’s jackets. Jeff wasn’t striving to make a career-launching moment, but it sort of happened.

The bulk of Jeff’s story is told by three women: Mary; Jeff’s first New York girlfriend, experimental artist and actor Rebecca Moore, who was the inspiration for most of the songs on Buckley’s only album, “Grace”; and his later girlfriend, musician Joan Wasser, whose band The Dambuilders often opened for Buckley on tour. (Wasser now performs under the name Joan as Police Woman.) Each of these women capture a side of Buckley’s personality, and Berg leaves it to the viewers to figure out where the pieces of the jigsaw fit. 

The movie also reflects on the strange nature of stardom, such as the irony of Buckley’s most famous song not being one he wrote, but his cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” (The 2022 documentary “Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song” commented that after Buckley’s death in 1997, more than a few musicians played “Hallelujah” as a tribute to Buckley — and some might have thought he wrote it.) 

“It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley” lays out the contradictions of Buckley’s life — such as the fact that he labored to escape his father’s shadow only to end up with a similar career path and early death — without trying to resolve them or pass judgment on them. Berg presents Jeff Buckley’s brief life and extraordinary music as best as anyone can, and all we can do is watch and appreciate the talent that blazed so briefly and brightly.

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‘It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, August 8, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for strong language, drug references and thematic elements. Running time: 106 minutes.

Review: 'Freakier Friday' is more frenetic than the 2003 original, but not as fun or as warm-hearted

There’s a frenetic sense of desperation that undercuts the comedy and camaraderie of the squeaky-clean teen comedy “Freakier Friday,” as if everyone involved is so determined to nail every joke that they squash too many of them.

The movie is the sequel to the 2003 Disney comedy “Freaky Friday,” in which a rock-guitarist teen, Anna (Lindsay Lohan), and her mom, Tess (Jamie Lee Curtis), fall under an old Chinese curse and swap bodies — forcing Anna to do adult stuff while Tess navigates her teen years all over again. It’s 22 years later, and the loving bickering hasn’t stopped.

These days, Tess is a therapist with a podcast and a devoted second husband, Ryan (Mark Harmon, also back from the original) — while Anna has channeled her rock ’n’ roll dreams into managing other musicians, namely a high-maintenance pop star, Ella (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan), who’s having a very public breakup. Anna also is a single mom with a surf-loving 15-year-old daughter, Harper (Julia Butters).

Topping it all off, Anna is engaged to marry Eric (Manny Jacinto), a chef and restaurant owner. Their meet-cute came when Harper and Eric’s daughter, Lily (Sophia Hammons), got into a fight at school a year earlier. Now, the high schoolers who hate each other are about to become step-sisters — and, after the wedding, leave Los Angeles to live in Eric and Lily’s old hometown, London.

At Anna’s family-friendly bachelorette party (it’s a Disney movie, after all), Anna and Tess have an encounter with a loopy psychic (Vanessa Bayer), who reads their palms and realizes “you’ve walked in each other’s path” — and that they may need to remember the lessons from their switcheroo 22 years ago. The same psychic also delivers a fortune to Harper and Lily: “Change the hearts you know are wrong to reach the place where you belong.”

The next morning, with the wedding only a couple days away, everyone wakes up as somebody else. Anna and Harper have swapped bodies, and so have Tess and Lily. And then the freakiness really gets started — or, at least, that’s the attempt made by director Nisha Ganatra (“The High Note,” “Late Night”) and screenwriter Jordan Weiss.

The plot sets Anna and Tess in their younger bodies on a course to find the psychic and undo the curse, while Harper and Lily — in the forms of Lohan and Curtis — decide to call a truce with the purpose of breaking up Anna and Eric before the wedding. They also try to fake being adults, in a series of vignettes that aren’t as funny as they should be.

Ganatra apparently knows there’s less genuine comedy here, because of the film’s efforts to pump up the volume with comic cameos from such comedians as Chloe FIneman, June Diane Raphael, Sherry Cola, George Wallace and Elaine Hendrix (for those who needed a “Parent Trap” reunion tosses in for good measure). There’s also Chad Michael Murray showing up as Jake, Lohan’s teen crush from the first movie, creating a nostalgic aura without coming anywhere near funny.

That’s the problem all over “Freakier Friday”: People who should be funny and charming are given little space for either. It’s good to see Curtis and Lohan reconnecting, this time as adults navigating motherhood and grandmotherhood, but the movie leaves them stranded without enough that’s authentically amusing or emotional.

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‘Freakier Friday’

★★

Opens Friday, August 8, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for thematic elements, rude humor, language and some suggestive references. Running time: 111 minutes.

Review: 'Sketch' is an effective scary movie for the pre-teen set, and the biggest surprise is how moving it is

Writer-director Seth Worley has created a fascinating beast in “Sketch” — a family-friendly horror movie that’s also a tender drama about family grief. It shouldn’t work, but it does, thanks to a playful tone and some unsettling animation.

Amber (Bianca Belle) is a moody 9-year-old who gets picked on regularly by Bowman (Kalon Cox), an obnoxious kid. Amber’s protector is her slightly older brother, Jack (Kue Lawrence). Her refuge is her sketchbook, in which she draws images of disturbing monsters — so disturbing that the school’s principal calls her dad, Taylor (Tony Hale), to find out how things are at home.

Things are not good at home. Taylor and the tow kids frequently tiptoe around the big thing they have in common: The recent death of Taylor’s wife, and the kids’ mom, Ally (Allie McCulloch, seen in occasional flashbacks). But, as Taylor’s sister, Liz (D’Arcy Carden), points out, Amber’s the only one with a coping mechanism, with her drawings — which the school counselor suggests she keep creating, because on paper, they can’t do any real harm.

This being a movie with a slight supernatural edge, the counselor’s statement turns out not to be true. Jack finds a pond in the woods near their house, and discovers that things that go into the water become fixed and/or healed. When Amber’s notebook lands in the pond, soon the forbidden monsters come bubbling up, reflecting the angry energy Amber put into drawing them.

Worley visualizes what’s next partly as a Japanese monster movie, with Amber’s creations as the kaiju rampaging the countryside. It’s also a chase picture, with the monsters pursuing Amber, Jack and their reluctant ally, Bowman, through the woods. And sometimes it’s got a twinge of horror, with suggestions of “Pet Sematary” and, in an audacious turn on Worley’s part, a PG-rated callback to the shower scene in “Psycho.”

“Sketch” is an oddly affecting movie, one where you come for the animated monsters and stay for the emotional wallop of watching a dad and his kids processing unfathomable grief. Holding it together is Worley’s inventive use of his animated monsters, and an innate understanding that kids like a good scare, too, if it’s calibrated for a cathartic surprise without creating some horror-movie trauma.

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‘Sketch’

★★★

Opens Wednesday, August 6, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for scary action, some violence, thematic elements, language and rude humor. Running time: 92 minutes.

Review: 'The Bad Guys 2' is as sharp and funny as the first one, on levels kids and adults will both enjoy

The animated heist thriller “The Bad Guys” was one of the happier surprises of 2022, a successful cross between “Ocean’s 11” and “Zootopia” — and it’s equally surprising that the sequel, “The Bad Guys 2,” is equally smart and funny.

The whole gang is back together, both in the story and in the voice booth — team leader The Big Bad Wolf (voiced by Sam Rockwell), safe-cracker Snake (voiced by Marc Maron), disguise expert Shark (voiced by Craig Robinson), ace hacker Tarantula (voiced by Awkwafina) and live-wire Piranha (voiced by Anthony Ramos). 

The intro shows them when they were still bad, on a job stealing from a billionaire in Cairo, before bringing them back their current lives, after they went to the good side in the last movie. Being law-abiding isn’t always great, as they’re rejected at job interviews because they’re not trusted. (At one point, Wolf interviews with a bank manager who reminds him that he robbed that bank three times.)

Wolf still has a friend in Gov. Diane Foxington (voiced by Zazie Beetz), who has given up her criminal alter ego, the Crimson Paw. And the gang even tries to help the police commissioner (voiced by Alex Borstein), to capture a new criminal, The Phantom Bandit, if only to prove it’s not them.

The Phantom Bandit turns out to be Kitty Kat (voiced by Danielle Brooks), who has two accomplices but needs the Bad Guys to help pull off a heist involving a tech billionaire (voiced by Colin Jost) who’s planning a rocket launch and a lavish wedding. (Where do screenwriters Yoni Brenner and Etan Cohen get their outlandish ideas?)

The writers, along with director Pierre Perifel (who also directed the first one) and co-director JP Sans, concoct a heist movie that’s cleverly twisty, and loaded with sharp references. Diane has a reunion with the first movie’s villain, Dr. Rupert Marmalade (voiced by Richard Ayoade), that is staged like Clarice Starling’s first prison meeting with Hannibal Lecter. Also, the mystery metal Kitty Kat wants to steal is called MacGuffinite. (If you know, you know.)

Happily, “The Bad Guys 2” knows how to work both sides of the line, entertaining the kids with bold, colorful humor (including, yes, an extended fart joke) while playing it smart for the grown-ups. And it sets up something interesting if they ever decide to make “The Bad Guys 3” — which, given the franchise’s track record, I hope they do.

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‘The Bad Guys 2’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, August 1, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for action/mild violence, rude humor and language. Running time: 104 minutes.

Review: 'The Naked Gun' reboot doesn't quite reach the wacky satirical heights of the original, but Pamela Anderson shows she's a great comic foil

Dang it, the reboot of “The Naked Gun” looked so good on paper — following up on a much-loved comedy franchise, casting a non-comedian with a tough-guy reputation like the first one did, and throwing everything to the wall to see what sticks. What could go wrong?

I’m afraid just enough goes wrong with the 2025 version of “The Naked Gun” — directed by Akiva Schaffer, who made the hilarious and smart boy-band mockumentary “Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping” — that it doesn’t achieve the comedy heights that the 1988 original did.

The movie follows Frank Drebin Jr. (Liam Neeson), who introduces himself in his noir-style voiceover as both “sergeant” and “detective lieutenant.” No matter, he’s the toughest cop in Police Squad, the unit his late father — played in the original by the great Leslie Nielsen — worked in for years, solving cases almost by accident. 

The younger Frank is more likely to fight than his dad, as Schaffer and co-writers Dan Gregor and Doug Mand explore ways to satirize Neeson’s career as a hard-as-nails action star. It’s a move that doesn’t pay off as much as it should, in part because Neeson seems too in on the joke, not reaching the heights of obliviousness Nielsen achieved at his peak.

The story, like it matters, starts with a bank robbery that Frank breaks up — but not before a slick baddie, Sig Gustafson (Kevin Durand), blows open a safe deposit box and takes a small electronic gadget, immediately identified as the P.L.O.T. Device. 

The next day, Frank and his partner, Ed Hocken Jr. (Paul Walter Hauser, taking the role George Kennedy played in Nielsen’s films), check out a car crash that left a man dead — a case initially ruled as a suicide. But the dead man’s sister, Beth Davenport (played by Pamela Anderson), thinks her brother was murdered, possibly by his employer, the tech billionaire Richard Cane (Danny Huston). Frank pursues the case, and also pursues romance with Beth, an author who describes her work like this: “I write true-crime novels based on fictional cases that I make up.”

Some of the extended set pieces work better than others. A romantic montage in a snowy cabin becomes its own comedic and creepy short story, and may be the movie’s finest sequence. On the other hand, a bit where Sig is using infrared binoculars to spy on Frank and Beth is a gag that overstays its welcome. The movie’s brief running time — it clocks in under 90 minutes, including credits that are worth staying for — is dotted with instances where Schaffer and his team don’t know when to let a joke end.

The one person here who fully understands the assignment and nails every scene is Anderson. Anyone who survived five seasons of “Baywatch” must have a sense of humor, and here Anderson shows that she’s got strong comic chops and is willing to sacrifice her dignity for a good joke. If someone isn’t building a sitcom around her right now, they’re missing out on a golden opportunity.

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‘The Naked Gun’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, August 1, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for crude/sexual material, violence/bloody images and brief partial nudity. Running time: 85 minutes.