Director – Timo Tjahjanto – 2025 – US – Cert. 15 – 89m
**
A professional hitman takes his family on holiday to rebuild their trust, embracing and revelling in the violence that erupts around him – out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 15th
“Who are you people?”, asks one of two investigating officers of a man (Bob Odenkirk) and his dog in an interrogation room in the bookend device that opens and closes this sequel. Flashback: he is a married man Hutch with a wife Becca (Connie Nielsen) and two teenage kids Brady (Gage Munroe), 17, and Sammy (Paisley Cadorath), 12. As the days of the week go by – Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday – mum gets the kids fed and off to their school (which we never see) and she drives off to her demanding real estate job (which, again, we never see).
We do see his work, though. Some days, he lies in, his head flashing back to disturbing and violent memories. Some days, he works: for instance, the day when he enters a hotel lift and brutally fights to the death with the three bodyguards protecting a suited convention guest who has in his possession the Card which our man has been instructed to retrieve. As he explains to his handler The Barber (Colin Salmon), with whom he is slowly but surely clearing a massive financial debt, he didn’t expect to confront a gang of gunmen once he exited the lift, or a carload of machete-wielding Brazilians once he arrived at the car park.
Anyway, his marriage appears to be on the rocks, his wife deleting “we need to talk” texts and replacing them with “Love u”. All he sees are the latter, which he finds strangely reassuring. But then, mornings, she tries to have that conversation with him. He fails in his attempt at conversation with son Brady about the black eye the latter picked up at the football game, for which Hutch failed to show up (because he was working). “But it wasn’t actually from the game,” protests his son. However, before his dad can get to the bottom of this, he is distracted by the need to get the wheelie bin out to the passing bin men before they’ve been and gone, by which time his son has gone off to school.
Informing his minder he needs to take a vacation, he shows his family a video of the holiday camp with Wild Bill’s Majestic Midway and Waterpark which for him represents the one decent, family holiday he had as a child; his family, along with grandpa David (Christopher Lloyd) agree to go there with him on holiday to emotionally reconnect.
Once there, Hutch has an eye-to-eye confrontation with the less than friendly local sheriff, Abel (Colin Hanks). The family discover that the water park itself is closed for 24 hours following an incident. The family are given free tickets for the local amusement arcade by way of compensation, where, a local youth picks a fight with Brady. The family walk away from the arcade, but Hutch just can’t let it go. He turns round, walks back in and proceeds to wreak mayhem on the youth and all comers as his family watch with a mixture of admiration and horror.
Things escalate via further impressively choreographed action set pieces including Hutch decimating a handful of thugs on a tour boat, a fight in a warehouse in which, when the bad guys fail to give his attempt as de-escalation a reasonable hearing, Hutch torches various items including a massive pile of neatly arranged banknotes and some barrels which turn out to contain high explosive, and, finally, a huge confrontation making much use of automatic guns and other weaponry, in the resort’s fairground at night between, on the one hand, the family, including gleefully violent, gun-toting grandpa and Hutch’s brother Harry (rapper RZA) who accompanied him on the original childhood holiday, and on the other, the vindictively vengeful and callous Lendina (a showstopping Sharon Stone), who owns the local town, and her assorted cohorts.
Somewhere in the course of all this, Hutch acquire the dangerous dog that lives in a cage on the fairground as his faithful mutt.
Meanwhile, it turns out that corrupt resort operator Wyatt Martin (John Ortiz) is in financial hoc to Lendina in a far worse way than Hutch is to The Barber. When Wyatt’s son is kidnapped by Lendina’s people on her orders, he finds himself switching loyalties to fight alongside Hutch.
The action sequences are underscored by classic show tunes e.g. When The Saints Go Marching In, in case you were in any doubt that violence and mayhem are a good thing to be celebrated (which dubious moral take is the reason this gets the low rating it does). It’s all put together with considerable prowess in the stunt department, but to watch means being asked to accept the gleeful attitude to violence throughout, which I’m afraid distanced me from everything on the screen.
The franchise’s creator, and co-screenwriter Derek Kolstadt certainly knows how to create memorable characters, and the largely po-faced cast seem to have a lot of fun playing the parts he’s created and participating in the considerable amounts on onscreen mayhem, but none of that can save Indonesian director Timo Tjahjanto, here making his first movie both in the US and for a Hollywood Studio, from delivering an essentially morally bankrupt vision, the sole function of which is to present and promote extreme violence as a form of pure entertainment. It’s hard to say whether the flaw lies as much in the film’s conception as it undeniably does in its execution.
It’s not that I would never defend violence in a film. Two recent examples. One of 2025’s most sheerly enjoyable moviegoing experience was the extremely violent Novocaine (Dan Berk, Robert Olsen, 2025), essentially a story about a man trying to rescue the girl he loves from peril. Over the top and plentiful though the violence is in that film, the violence itself (and the viewer’s revelling in it) never becomes the purpose of the film. Another comparison: the John Wick action franchise, represented moist recently by John Wick Chapter 4 (Chad Stahelski, 2023) and the spinoff Ballerina (Len Wiseman, 2025), contains violent stunts but is always, ultimately, about morality-based codes of honour.
Now, here’s the weird thing: creator / co-writer Kolstadt is also the co-creator of the John Wick franchise. Which ought to bode well.
What I disliked so much about Nobody 2 is its gleeful embrace of violence and modern military weaponry as catharsis. This movie made me feel like as party pooper who wants to come down on its attitude to screen violence. That’s quite an achievement. If you decide to go and see this, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Nobody 2 is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, August 15th.
Trailer: