Bored with his career, Bob Odenkirk fights a town

Winkler’s the only one summoning up the energy that Wheatley and Kolstad’s cleverness-starved concept requires, while everyone else is a warm body to splatter on the snowy streets. Lena Headey turns up to serve as a recognizable face, while Reena Jolly and Brendan Fletcher play out-of-town bank robbers who kick off the violence by accidentally stumbling upon the town’s secret. Even that short sentence pays more attention to those three actors than the entirety of Normal. Yet they all serve a purpose, as props for Wheatley to explode or riddle with bullet holes or otherwise obliterate, and as plot clutter for Odenkirk’s barely interested sheriff to navigate.

Undercutting quaintness with violence is a tonal rug-pull that should come as second nature to these kinds of movies, but Normal is so eager to disclose its mystery (the film’s only 90 minutes and about half still feels tacked on) that it never establishes anything to upend, or attempts to so clumsily that its take on rotted Americana reads like Stephen King just suffered a blow to the head. When the rug is removed, though, and the guns come out, it’s all shot with a dark disregard for its own action, making even the goopiest punchlines more likely to evoke a squint than a laugh. And, despite Ulysses and his pair of tagalongs holing up first in a bank and then in a police station, Normal never devotes itself to the contained bad-taste thrills of something like Assault On Precinct 13. Rather, the trio shuffle from illegibly gray, gloomy set piece to illegibly gray, gloomy set piece, blasting away nameless townspeople to Edgar Wright Lite jukebox tracks and gouging out eyes with the verve of Lucio Fulci (in the present day, as a man who has been dead for 30 years).

Even if Normal shotgunned open the chest of a local hardware store proprietor, there’d be no heart to speak of in this by-the-book B movie. Ulysses has nothing going on, either in his tragic(ish) backstory or his monotone present, while the absurdity of how deeply this criminal mindset has infiltrated his new community never reaches the frenzied ridiculousness of Kolstad’s most lasting creation: John Wick. If you’re not immediately tickled by Normal‘s premise, which cements into the traditions of narrative conflict—man versus nature, man versus man, man versus self—the very literal concept of “man versus entire town,” this is the least of the Odenkickass movies. And if that idea makes you smile, Normal might be even more disappointing for how mechanically it goes through motions that used to be novel.

Director: Ben Wheatley
Writer: Derek Kolstad
Starring: Bob Odenkirk, Henry Winkler, Lena Headey
Release Date: April 17, 2026