Joe Longtin

It’s an amusing thrill ride. Lots of well timed laughs and satisfying beats. (Spoilers follow). But it doesn’t rise above what it is at heart: A white suburban middle-aged man’s escapist fantasy, where he beats up street thugs and psychopathic Russian mobsters, pretends to be a schlump while no one around him suspects that he is virtually indestructible and knows a thousand very clever ways to kill a man, yet has healthy dinners at six relationships with his willful yet helpless wife and children. I was not surprised when some folks walked out after the first massively violent fight scene, which was initiated by Odenkirk’s character Hutch as a way to blow off steam. They weren’t white men suffering a midlife crisis or presumably married to one. Not to say that Odenkirk and the rest of the cast aren’t in on the comic, Tarantino-esque gaudy violence and kool-aid commercial volumes of blood mist. Like almost everything Tarantino, the script misses opportunities to go into satirical territory, where it could expose Hutch’s pathetic life and privileged acting out for what they are. And let the audience in on it. There is no peeling away of that particular bandage. Hutch’s Black adoptive brother doesn’t get a family, he lives off grid, and he apparently only pops up to rescue Hutch. Hutch’s dad - a gleeful Christopher Lloyd - is near-catatonic with nonstop cable TV until called upon to point both barrels of a sawed-off at two assassins. Hutch doesn’t learn anything. He doesn’t change. Neither does anyone else around him. All the bad guys (and I mean ALL 354 of them) die miserably. It’s a midlife crisis solved with live rounds and the occasional claymore without even a wink to suggest that Hutch or Odenkirk realize, “Hey, I know this story is just pablum for the modern Willy Loman.”