Gunsmoke: "Normal"

After a decade and a half of restless graft on the cinema's indie fringes, Ben Wheatley appears to have wound up more or less where he wants to be. Every now and again, he'll veer off into experimental, leftfield territory - as was the case with his most recent venture Bulk, with which he's just toured the arthouse circuit. In between times, however, he knocks off a highish-profile, well-compensated American gig - such as 2023's The Meg 2: The Trench - which then allows him to go off and make another foray into more experimental, leftfield territory. (This viewer still hopes Wheatley will someday return to the project that began life as Colin, You Anus, but that may well depend on the BBC not blowing its annual drama budget on Richard Gadd's latest attempt to work through his issues while avoiding paying for therapy.) Normal, a job-for-hire from a script by John Wick III and Nobody scribe Derek Kolstad, opens as Wheatley's stab at a Coen Brothers movie: its title refers to a small, snowy Minnesotan backwater whose recently deceased sheriff went by the altogether familiar name of Gunderson. The sheriff's interim replacement, who goes by the no less familiar first name of Ulysses and is played by Bob Odenkirk, is settling in as we first join him, surrounded by what his voiceover calls "good people, small problems". What he discovers over the course of the movie is that this small, quiet, normal town is, in fact, properly weird rather than merely quirky, covering up - as it has been - not just his predecessor's mysterious death, but the vast sums of money concentrated hereabouts, and the jawdropping array of weapons locked away in the police precinct's backrooms.

What develops is a multiplex variant of the small, messy situations Wheatley worked through first on TV's Ideal, then in his feature debut Down Terrace, and more recently in 2016's one-location shoot-'em-up Free Fire: the plot, indeed, turns on an attempted bank robbery that goes awry in unusual, unexpected ways. Leaving Coenland behind, Normal next turns left into a John Carpenter scenario, Kolstad's script passing sly comment on the death of Main Street, American self-interest and the perilously easy availability of guns across the continental US, before turning decisively right into cartoon violence, much as Nobody did before it. As was the case there, your mileage may vary: a little of this gruesome Looney Tunes stuff tends to go a long way. If I found Normal an improvement on the slipshod and slaphappy Free Fire, it's because a) Wheatley's working with American money here - giving him more varied shit to blow up - and b) Odenkirk's hangdog humanity provides a steadying counterpoint to all the knockabout nonsense going on around him. The movie that finally emerges through a thick haze of gunsmoke, its face blackened, its hair all up on end, is more than a little ramshackle, bordering on the glib. Just as a job of writing and direction, it feels like a technical or mechanical exercise, reliant on the hero eventually circling back to every last one of the plot points set up in the first act and on those behind the camera finding new ways to film shootouts and instigate shootouts. I spent much of Normal's back end thinking fondly of 2012's underseen The Last Stand, which had Arnie in the Odenkirk role and now feels like a relic of the last moment when independent producers had real money to spend on explosions. The cherry bombs Wheatley tosses our way here will just about do if you're at a loose end of a Friday or Saturday night - and they'll have to do: parsing the threadbare release schedule, it's not as if we're getting a big-budget, Bruckheimer-level action picture this summer, more's the pity.

Normal is now showing in selected cinemas.