The trials and triumphs of the small-town lawman are a distinctly American tale. The tradition stretches at least as far back as the classical Western, with films such as the 1952 classic High Noon, in which moral duty manifests in a lone man in an obscure town facing a looming threat.
It is an archetype born of a postwar American imagination, when the United States had emerged as a global superpower and bulwark against communist tyranny. Unlike the glamorous sophistication of James Bond, fashioned to revive the waning image of the British Empire, the American lawman was minimalist and prosaic.
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Screenwriter Derek Kolstad, who wrote the John Wick franchise and previously collaborated with Bob Odenkirk on Nobody, returns to this tradition with Normal (now streaming on Amazon Prime), another welcome vehicle for Odenkirk’s late-career transformation into a middle-aged action star. Unlike the balletic lethality of Keanu Reeves’s John Wick, Odenkirk brings a natural everyman countenance to his roles, making him disarmingly likable and relatable.
In Normal, Odenkirk plays Ulysses, an interim sheriff newly arrived in the unassuming Minnesota town of Normal, filling in after the previous sheriff’s mysterious death. The premise is something similar to Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz transplanted into the Coen brothers’ frigid and folksy world of Fargo: a dark comedy of small-town politeness curdling into criminal absurdity.
At first, Normal appears as unremarkable as any small town. Ulysses diagnoses its broad disposition as “good people, small problems.” Reeling from a fraught marriage, he writes to his estranged wife that “life’s a lot easier when you care a little less,” explaining his recent detachment and reluctance to meddle.
Yet his own behavior suggests otherwise. Beneath the professed indifference, he remains genuinely kind and empathetic, leaving parking tickets that merely read “park better,” resolving petty disputes among the town’s denizens, and helping a troubled adolescent make it through the night.
Yet the town’s quaint façade begins to crack almost immediately. “How did you raise $17 million in a town of a few thousand people?” Ulysses wonders, seeing a charity banner. Touring the police station, he is startled by an armory fit for supplying an insurgency. “Is that C4? Why do you have that?”
It is only when an unexpected bank robbery goes awry that this pretense drops entirely, and Normal shifts into a stylized and highly entertaining action-comedy that barely lets up until its coda.
The bank, it turns out, contains a gold-filled vault belonging to the Yakuza, and once word spreads that their treasure is in jeopardy, the town’s pleasant Midwestern exterior gives way to a conspiracy of corruption and violence. Most of Normal, we learn, is in cahoots with the Japanese criminal enterprise, and will take any measure necessary to placate its katana-wielding enforcers.
This is where the film’s Western lineage becomes clearest. Cinematic lawmen such as Gary Cooper’s Will Kane in High Noon famously lament their duty while shouldering it anyway. “I’ve got to, that’s the whole thing,” Kane says, expressing the entire moral burden of the Western hero. Ulysses belongs to that tradition, though filtered through Kolstad’s comic and carnal brutality.
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What makes him persuasive as a modern lawman, however, is not mythic invulnerability, but the opposite. In Nobody, Odenkirk played a trained killer — a suburban John Wick with a family and a minivan. But in Normal, though Ulysses knows his way around a weapon and can more than hold his own against frenzied gangsters, he is palpably vulnerable and human. Through the second act, he is shot, stabbed, and beaten so many times that you hope he sprang for the premium health plan. Yet this is what gives the violence weight. Ulysses is both capable of causing harm and capable of being harmed, making his choices matter. He could have turned a blind eye to the town’s rot and the Yakuza’s terror; he is only passing through as an interim sheriff in a town that is not his. But the genre exists to remind us that reluctance does not absolve responsibility.
The movie has its share of absurdities and is not meant to be taken with the gravity of Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven. It is a dark comedy at heart, and occasionally a very silly one. But beneath the aestheticized bloodshed, Normal revives an old but important American ideal that “minding your own business” ceases to be a virtue when it becomes an excuse for cowardice. And when institutions fail and succumb to corruption, one battered, reluctant lawman can still be enough to stand in the way.
Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner. He is a software engineer, holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at BetweenBottles.com