Bob Odenkirk’s Hutch is back.
In “Nobody 2,” now in theaters, all Hutch wants to do is take some family time and go on vacation. The suburban dad who happens to be a stealth assassin hasn’t been seeing enough of his family. Except he still owes the Russian mob their money, and decides to takes a break from his daily kills. So, he takes his wife, Becca (Connie Nielsen), and kids to a waterpark resort in the small (ficticious) town of Plummerville.
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Unbeknownst to him, Plummerville is a shady and corrupt place. It’s led by Sheriff Abel (Colin Hanks), and the park serves as a front for Lendina (Sharon Stone), a notorious money launderer. When Hutch gets into in small tussle, things rapidly escalate, forcing him to show this town his fighting abilities.
Stunt coordinator Greg Rementer tells Variety that from the get-go, one concept was how to take the action set piece of the bus from the first film and double down on that while staying true to the summer vibe of the sequel. “It came from this childhood experience that Bob had,” Rementer says. “He said, ‘I remember going on these duck boats when I would go to the Wisconsin Dells as a kid.’”
Initially, Rementer was excited about the sequence, assuming “they’d park a boat on a blue screen, and we’ll go through the fight.” He was wrong. He was told that the scene would be shot on a real boat on water. Rementer says, “That immediately opened up twice the possibilities, due to interaction, movement and ambiance.”
In piecing the fight together, Rementer knew it would be different from the bus fight featured in the first film. “It was a buildup that allowed a character to exert frustrations. The duck boat fight was the opposite of that. Hutch is like, ‘I’m going to restrain myself.’”
In working with the action design company at 87North, Rementer says he drew inspiration from Jackie Chan.
Another factor Rementer took into consideration was looking at a boat. Would it tip? What things could be violent and fun? He explains they workshopped everything and created a stunt viz. “We put up our boxes and we started creating different types of boats, and what tools are there that we could be used as weapons, and things that you would never think would be weapons.”
Rementer calls the first attempt at the duck boat fight “a smorgasbord” because it had different things, and it was longer.” However, once the director and producers got to see it, the fight was pared down to just the meat.
And while things are completely demolished, the storytelling remained key and moments such as cuts to the oblivious passengers allowed “moments to breathe.”
As for Odenkirk’s dedication, Remeneter says the actor never stopped training, and that helped when it came to designing the action. “He’s training every morning at like, 6 a.m. on his own, in the gym. Every day he’s doing, you know, 100 pull-ups, 100 punches on both sides, 100 kicks.” The beauty of it all, was that Odenkirk could “handle longer sections in some scenarios.”
Rementer concludes, “The thing that makes it the most fun is that Bob Odenkirk can do it all, and because of that, that’s the limitless possibilities, because the audience is just going to sit there. I said, ‘Bob, you’ve got to do it all. Nobody wants to see anybody else do it except you. So, we’re going to shape that to your skill set. And I’m going to push you past your limits of the first one.’” And Odenkirk was indeed game to do it all.
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