Flasz On Film

There was a time, a little while ago, when an upcoming Ben Wheatley movie would inspire excitement. This was especially true at the time when his early works like Down Terrace, Kill List, A Field in England and Sightseers were still fairly fresh in the collective cultural memory. There was something intriguing about this director who graduated into feature filmmaking from a TV and commercial background, as opposed to indie movies.

However, even looking at his first four features—and you might as well include his fifth High Rise in here too—is enough to pose the rather fundamental question pertaining to Wheatley’s artistic direction of travel. He seemingly went from a satirical and gritty take on a crime movie to a moody piece of folk horror. Then directed what essentially was Badlands in Yorkshire, followed by an experimental indie, and a J.G. Ballard adaptation. Stylistically speaking, Wheatley remained impossible to pinpoint and his output presented itself as evidential of genre tourism. It seemed that he didn’t quite see himself particularly tethered to any specific genre language at all.

If anything, his output was clearly inspired by the works of Indiewood mavericks and 80’s genre titans, but only insofar as these inspirations were useful to his given projects. I don’t think that Ben Wheatley ever aspired to become the UK’s answer to Tarantino—this was a title Guy Ritchie most assuredly gunned for with his early works—but he wouldn’t say no if a good enough opportunity presented itself. That’s why Free Fire looked quite a bit like an attempt at a love letter to Reservoir Dogs and why there are subtle notes of Kill Bill found in his newest directorial piece Normal.

However, it would be completely disingenuous to refer to this movie as an out-and-out directorial love letter of any kind, let alone proof that Wheatley’s work does after all carry a thematic or stylistic through-line. It does only insofar as the director likes what he likes and chooses projects to attach himself to the way a holidaymaker at an all-inclusive resort makes decisions at an all-you-can-eat buffet: it matters little if what goes on the plate plays well together, while the main driver for what does go on the plate is whether it would fit on it and if it’s something that holidaymaker fundamentally enjoys.

And what I think Ben Wheatley enjoys are these genre opportunities that let him behave just a little bit like Robert Rodriguez while also having a bit of a taste of something that’s currently popular. You might call it directorial opportunism and you probably wouldn’t be wrong. On this occasion, what ended up in Wheatley’s lap was a script written by Derek Kolstad, one of the masterminds behind the John Wick series. Before working on Nobody with Bob Odenkirk—itself a stylistic offshoot of that Stahelski–Leitch video game-inspired filmmaking—Kolstad had penned the script for Normal and ended up showing it to Odenkirk. They polished the movie together and brought Wheatley on board to drive it. After all, he’d be statistically unlikely to impose his own vision upon the movie and stood good chance of understanding the assignment: mesh those post-Stahelski vibes with some Hitchcockian intrigue and season it all with a tiny bit of that singular energy carried over from the time when the Coen Brothers and Indiewood folks ruled the roost.

So, what came out of this experiment was a movie about a substitute sheriff (Odenkirk) who comes into the snow-covered town of Normal, Minnesota to keep the peace while the town elects a new sheriff following his predecessor’s tragic death. Crucially, this sleepy Coen-esque settlement is also home to a massive under-the-radar money laundering operation overseen by the Japanese Yakuza, about which Odenkirk’s character—Ulysses his name—learns only after he stops an improvised bank robbery. What’s more, the entire town seems to be in on the racket and they’d rather eliminate Ulysses to placate their Yakuza bosses than risk going to jail. Carnage ensues.

You can easily see that there’s very little connecting this movie to Wheatley’s portfolio, such as it is and it is only tangentially related to Free Fire on the basis of being a comedically-slanted piece of action filmmaking. But that might be purely coincidental. After all, that holidaymaker at an all-inclusive resort might end up with two pieces of grilled chicken on his plate purely by accident. The real drive here comes from Kolstad who seems eager to extend the wave of post-Wick popularity for as long as humanly possible while also capitalizing on Bob Odenkirk’s personal currency.

But that’s just about it. If you happen to be a fan of John Wick movies, Bullet Train and Nobody, chances are you might enjoy Normal as a Wick-adjacent piece meshing elements from all those Stahelski features with some notes of Fargo, Kill Bill and a few others. But being perfectly honest, Normal plays out conveniently and conventionally and doesn’t ever strain itself enough to attempt anything novel, visually inspiring or vaguely unfamiliar. Odenkirk is predictably likeable—he can’t help it; his facial game is too cute for criticism and acting-wise he’s the antithesis of Bryan Cranston, the master overactor—but it’s nowhere near enough to carry a movie whose structural framework and plotting are clearly and shamelessly template-driven. The action undercuts itself with humour in predictable manner, the violence is recognizably kinetic and only marginally upsetting and the film is paced exactly like you’d expect from a modern post-Wick actioner.

Therefore, the whole experience registers as mediocre because between the number of post-Wick movies, we’ve seen it all before. And this is actually quite disheartening because the choice to hire Ben Wheatley to direct this movie—which already was en route towards dissatisfying predictability—would never result in the film being given a brand new flavour to embellish that Wickian template. As I remarked above, Wheatley probably ended up directing this because (1) he had made a movie in this vein before and (2) his ego wouldn’t get in the way of things. And something tells me that Normal would have registered as quite a bit more intriguing if they had hired someone with a much more distinct voice behind the camera, not a genre tourist with a plate of assorted proteins gathered while cruising an all-inclusive buffet.

Sadly, Normal never truly finds its footing and fails to escape the orbit of those recognizable genre icons of the last decade that the screenwriter had also worked on in the past. Although some sequences are confidently put together, occasionally funny and indulgent when it comes to deployment of carnage, it is nothing to write home about. For all its posturing, choreography and competently structured mystery writing, Normal just doesn’t have enough oomph to sustainably raise my heart rate. I’ve seen it all before and I’ve seen it done the same way too—with much better results.

While I’m happy that Ben Wheatley gets to make mainstream movies and probably had fun directing this one, I wish he’d come back to making truly outstanding movies like the ones he directed at the onset of his career. This is nowhere near as ridiculous and preposterously stylized as it perhaps needed to be to assert its own identity in the crowd of post-Wick action thrillers, nor does it have enough grit to stand apart as a de facto evolution of this trend. And when it comes to movies about ageing sheriffs having to stand up to ruthless mafiosos, I will still go for the mostly forgotten Arnie-starring The Last Stand before I revisit Normal.