Ben Wheatley’s somewhat slapstick Minnesota-set Odenkirk-actioner features the star of Nobody as a new lawman in town, uncovering a vast conspiracy among the locals and having to break out the big guns… sadly the results are nothing but a Cold Fuzz. Normal is a snowbound siege that’s not so much Normal as Same Old, Same Old.
★★
The town of Normal, Minnesota presents itself as low-key, functional, quietly proud. The sort of place where nothing much happens and that’s ok. Into this arrives Ulysses Richardson (Bob Odenkirk), a temporary sheriff bridging the gap between the mysterious death of his predecessor and the election of a permanent replacement. He has no history in the town and no fidelity to its habits. As in a classic western, we have an outsider lawman stepping into a closed system; a move that sets dominos falling until everything is on fire.
Richardson’s introductory ride-along establishes the local texture: affable deputies, minor incidents, a rhythm of small ‘Minnesota nice’ frictions – although something, somewhere seems off. When a botched bank job upends the calm, the film starts to show its hand. Ulysses quickly realises that the town isn’t under threat; the town is the threat, with a conspiracy to keeps the bank vault’s contents hidden at any cost.
The new lawman, murderous town secrets and suspiciously well-stocked armoury all gesture toward the same territory as Hot Fuzz, albeit without the comic zing of Edgar Wright’s buddy cop gem. Instead, the film sits at the sillier end of Taken’s “older man in action” mode, that has dominated mid-budget genre work for the past decade. Odenkirk’s post-Nobody trajectory is key to that, but unlike Nobody this is a flattened, glib example of the genre, where not even the arrival of a convoy of Yakuza baddies can generate much excitement.
Wheatley has always been drawn to closed systems under pressure, and there are flashes here of that instinct. Spaces are clearly defined, violence is staged with a certain blunt clarity, and there’s an underlying idea about a community sustaining itself through neoliberal times by selling out to organised crime. But the rhythm never quite takes. Scenes begin at a simmer and end at the same temperature – even as cars explode and people are decapitated it all feels a bit rote.
Odenkirk remains watchable, largely because he resists myth. He plays Ulysses as someone thinking through each move rather than asserting it, which at least grounds the film’s more inflated turns. There are hints of a cannier idea, that he understands how hollow the badge is in a place that has already decided its own rules, but the script doesn’t give him the room to develop it.
The most telling weakness is in the conspiracy itself. The film wants the town’s complicity to feel systemic, but it’s treated more as a plot mechanism than as anything that makes much sense. The underlying idea, that order here is maintained through quiet, collective violence, never fully locks into place, or feels properly sinister.
There are vague themes that might have held it together: the tension between an outsider’s code and a community’s collective will; the notion of law as performance in a place that no longer believes in it; the quintessential Minnesotan theme of of politeness operating as a cover for control. These ideas briefly surface, then quickly dissipate. The film understands the shape of what it’s trying to do, but not how to make those elements cohere.
What remains is a competent genre exercise that moves through its beats with precision but without any real accumulation of meaning. In the end Normal doesn’t feel sufficiently off the chain – it’s just another action comedy exercise, lacking in zip, and it’s all too, well, Normal. Moribund. Cold fuzz.
Normal played at the Overlook Film Festival, and is out in US cinemas from today.
Whitlock&Pope 