Normal

Before streaming it, I knew nothing about Normal except that the movie had some fairly good reviews, was made by a director whose work I had found interesting (although I didn't remember his name) and that the picture was set in rural Minnesota.  Of course, a film about crime in a small town in this State has some distinguished predecessors, namely Sam Raimi's A Simple Plan and the Coen brothers' Fargo.  And, so, I expected something witty, well-acted, and rooted in the folkways of the Land of Ten-Thousand Lakes.  Normal has nothing in common with previous Minnesota based pictures.  It's a raw, violent, action movie with some well-staged gun fights, an idiotic plot that delights in its implausibility, and a body count that must reach fifty or sixty corpses, many of them buried in snow drifts lining the town's main drag.  The picture is entertaining, but morally reprehensible:  it's mostly an excuse to choreograph gory deaths for its characters, brutality that might be disturbing if the picture weren't so thoroughly cartoonish.  Ben Wheatley, a British director, made this picture and it's a bait and switch -- for about twenty minutes the picture mimics Fargo and A Simple Plan, but, then, it switches into a shoot 'em up that looks one of John Woo's hyper-violent gangster pictures.  The only surprising thing in the movie is that it fools its audience into expecting something on the order of the Coen Brothers and, then, suddenly departs for the wild and wooly territories of Hong Kong action movies.  

Normal is a typical Minnesota town with a local bank filled with gold bullion bars and mountainous piles of greenbacks all hoarded in the vault by the Yakuza, a Japanese crime syndicate that, for some reason, has decided to conceal its ill-gotten gains in the village.  The town's sheriff has died in unusual circumstances, frozen to death in his underwear with a ice-fishing auger in his hand.  A new sheriff is filling in for the deceased, a mild-mannered temporary cop named Ulysses.  Ulysses is played by Bob Odenkirk, the great actor who made Better Call Saul such a sensation; here Odenkirk is playing a role that requires him to run around firing a machine gun, throw bombs, and blow people up.  (He also stabs a guy with an awl in the eye and, then, beats his victim's head against a wall to hammer the sharp point into the villain's brain.)  Odenkirk is an attractive presence in the film, channeling the sort of humble good guy vibes that were so convincingly displayed by Bruce Willis in the Die Hard films.  He's the sort of fellow who yearns for a way to win back his ex-wife, recites love-struck soliloquies to her, and won't enforce the town's laws, giving even DWI suspects a pass on their drunk driving.  His plan is to sit out the six weeks prior to thecounty election and, then, get out of Dodge when the new sheriff assumes his role.  Of course, since it is Minnesota, it's constantly snowing and there's a vagrant moose wandering around the small town's streets and alleys.  (I hate to break it to Mr. Wheatley but there aren't any moose in the soybean and corn country where the town is located.)  A couple of sad sacks straight out of Fargo plan to rob the town's Savings and Loan.  They take hostages and the local cops led by Ulysses, the new interim Sheriff, hurry to the Bank.  When Ulysses enters the bank to negotiate with robbers, he is suddenly engulfed in a hail of bullets fired by his own men -- that is, the local cops who know about the treasure in the vault decide that it's time to gun down the sheriff so that the lucrative business with the Yakuzas isn't discovered.  This is the best and most interesting scene in the movie, the sudden attack mounted on our hero by his deputies, a puzzling development that is not explained until we are shown the glittering content of the vault.  The two inept robbers fight off the deputies for a while and, then, are thrown out of the movie -- badly wounded, they leave town in a snowstorm driving a snow-plow.  (This is disappointing because the dimwitted nincompoops are amusing in a sort of commedia dell' arte way.)  The rest of the movie consists of Ulysses and a sidekick, the daughter of the sheriff earlier murdered by the bad guys, running around the snowy village and killing people.  Some people get bonked on the head with bars of gold, the mayor (played by the luckless Henry Winkler) gets blown to smithereens, some get gutted or their heads blown off.  Meanwhile the Yakuza are flying into town on a private jet.  An army of about twenty Japanese gangsters arrive in the snowy village.  By this time, the bad guys have made common cause with Ulysses and his sidekick to deceive the Yakuza.  Everyone attends a celebratory party with the Japanese gangsters breaking bread with the townsfolk across a long table in the local bar.  Someone pops a champagne cork and everyone pulls their guns and automatic weapons.  The exchange of fire results in all the bad guys, whether villainous locals or Yakuzas, getting shot to pieces, thereby ending the movie on the basis of the slaughter of its entire cast except Ulysses and the girl who somehow survive.  There is nothing in the movie, except the reversal of fortune involving the bank robbers, that is even remotely surprising or unanticipated.  Once the premise is established and the nature of the armaments defined the movie simply follows its own vicious logic until nobody (or almost nobody) is left alive.   

The gunfights are showy and involve lots of bullets tearing through glass bottles, windows, and other friable stuff.  Many of the shoot-outs involve high explosives and big bouquets of fire.  Wheatley is obviously an admirer of John Woo's work and he stages the gunbattles with pyrotechnic confidence and a keen eye for the trajectory of bullets, ricochets, and shattering glass.  By comparison with the violent scenes in Christopher Nolan's Odyssey, Ben Wheatley is a master craftsman when it comes to exchanges of gunfire and fights with sledge hammers, awls, and other tools usually found in small-town hardware stores.  Nolan doesn't know how to configure an effective fight scene.  Wheatley's movie, which is more or less terrible, at least, has good, clearly choreographed battle scenes.  

The movie is sort of a cheat.  It's not even made in Minnesota although the scenes in the small town have a convincing appearance.  The picture was shot in rural Manitoba out on the great plains.  At least, the snow looks convincing.