A lone, principled lawman rolling into an unlawful town, facing down a community who violently resents his presence, is a hoary old Western premise, which Normal transposes to the snowy small town of Normal, Minnesota. If it was directed by anyone besides Free Fire‘s Ben Wheatley, it would’ve been a simple Midwestern, flavored with the kind of sub-Fargoisms those in the entertainment industry think of as colorful. But, penned by Derek Kolstad (writer of Nobody and its sequel), this film is the new Normal for Bob Odenkirk—only now the joke isn’t that an unassuming suburbanite who looks like Bob Odenkirk is a virtuosic killer, but that Kolstad’s one gag applies to an entire small town. All of Normal is Hot Fuzzed up into a criminal militia, with Odenkirk as another grumpy old ass-kicking hero set against them. But neither the bit nor the ensuing bloodbath tap into any of the chaotic juvenilia that’s made Wheatley’s gonzo genre romps stand out—and its star is visibly tiring of his own career pivot.
The only thing that Ulysses (Odenkirk)—the depressed and aimless substitute sheriff for Normal, filling in for a few weeks after the death of its former officeholder—doesn’t explicitly break down in his clunky voiceover infodumps is that Normal’s in bed with the yakuza. A splattery cold open is what makes that clear, and between that and the narration, nothing is left to the imagination. As Ulysses patrols the town, he’s met by uncanny yet not exactly funny townsfolk, all clearly hiding something. His fellow cops are too inept yet too well-armed, the shopkeepers too shifty—even the mailman is a bit too friendly. The only one actually rising to the occasion, delighting in putting up a cracked facade, is Henry Winkler, who plays the town’s folksy, smarmy mayor and has far too little screentime.
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
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