Over the years, we’ve seen countless characters wander into corrupt small towns and become entrapped by the locals. Usually, the mean face of these movies is the town sheriff. The best recent example: Don Johnson’s crooked lawman in 2024’s “Rebel Ridge.”
But in Ben Wheatley’s “Normal,” the good guy drifting into town IS the sheriff. Ulysses (Bob Odenkirk) has come to Normal, Minnesota, in the dead of winter to fill in for the town’s recently deceased sheriff.
Now, I don’t think traveling substitute sheriffs are necessarily a real thing any more than police officers named after Homeric heroes. But “Normal,” a hyperviolent Midwestern Western that cleverly inverts some genre standards, has a pleasingly loose hold on reality. It’s a goofy, gory good time. And while it shares a lot of DNA with Odenkirk’s two “Nobody” movies, “Normal” is the best and most convincing showcase for Odenkirk as a butt-kicking action hero yet.
When Ulysses wakes up in a motel in Normal, a quaint town of 1,890, he seems to be doing only slightly better than Saul did at most points in “Better Call Saul.” He leaves a message for his estranged wife (just like his namesake, they’re separated) and greets an officer, Deputy Mike Nelson (Billy MacLellan), eager to show him around town.
Odenkirk, a brilliant comic mind, has proven surprisingly adept at playing middle-aged washouts who maybe have a few moves left. His Sheriff Ulysses has given up trying too hard when it comes to upholding the peace. “Life’s a lot easier when you care a little less,” he says. His goal, he says, is to leave Normal the way he found it.
But Normal tests his apathy. The town, set on a wintry tundra, seems to be doing well — too well, in fact. A banner by the town hall celebrates the raising of $16.8 million for some initiative. The police department is stocked with an unusual amount of weaponry. Around town, the local hardware store has a suspicious locked closet. Even the old lady with a yarn store is listening to a police scanner.
The former sheriff also had a surprisingly grand home. His death was a little mysterious, too. And we learn more about his transgender teenage child, Alex (Jess McLeod), whose precarious situation as a veritable outcast suggests the town residents may be quite aggressively controlling who gets to call Normal home.
How Ulysses navigates this and a few other situations quickly arouses the concern of a mayor (Henry Winkler, having a ball) looking for a sheriff with a “light touch.” So when a couple of down-on-their-luck thieves (Brendan Fletcher, Reena Jolly) try to hold up a bank, the resulting standoff goes unlike any you’ve seen before. The mayor, the two deputies (Ryan Allen plays the other) and, soon enough, the entire town turn on Ulysses. Midwestern manners fall away and mayhem begins.
“Normal” is written by “John Wick” creator Derek Kolstad, who also penned the “Nobody” movies that launched Odenkirk as an action star. And it exists quite knowingly alongside movies before it. We are not far from “Fargo” territory, a fact nodded to in the name of the previous sheriff, Gunderson — the same as Frances McDormand’s sheriff in the great Coen brothers movie.
“Normal” doesn’t aim for the dark comedy of the Coens. It’s closer to the cartoony underground network qualities of the “John Wick” franchise. The Japanese yakuza appear in the first scene in “Normal,” so you know they’re going to have something to do with the small-town nefariousness, despite being so many worlds away.
So “Normal” morphs into a kind of over-the-top “Bad Day at Black Rock,” with its streets turned into a combat zone. Many of its twists aren’t hard to see coming, and the movie sometimes lacks the scale needed for a sprawling battle. But a mustachioed Odenkirk with a shotgun is, by most metrics, more than enough firepower for any movie.
Wheatley is also in his wheelhouse. The British director has often wavered between conceptual missteps (2020’s “Rebecca,” 2015’s “High-Rise”) and plodding, Tarantino-inspired grindhouse exercises (2016’s “Free Fire,” 2023’s “Meg 2: The Trench”). But he knows his way around a firefight. And while there isn’t much that’s new in “Normal,” it — not unlike Ari Aster’s “Eddington” last year — gamely filters national politics into a small-town thriller where the local law can be on the side of good, or not.
“Normal,” an Magnolia release opening in theaters Friday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for strong bloody violence and language. Running time: 90 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.
