A worn-out sheriff takes a quiet posting in a small Minnesota town called Normal, hoping to put some distance between himself and his own wreckage. The place is prosperous, polite, and far too calm. Then a bank robbery goes wrong, his own deputies open fire on civilians, and Sheriff Ulysses, played by Bob Odenkirk, works out that Normal is sitting on a secret worth killing for. If that shape sounds like an Odenkirk movie you have already seen, there is a reason for it. The man who wrote it has been writing this same character for more than a decade.
Normal arrived on HBO Max on August 14 and took the top movie spot in a single day. Ben Wheatley directed it, it runs a lean and loud 91 minutes, and critics have it at 76 percent. But the detail that makes it more than another Odenkirk shoot-em-up is this. Derek Kolstad wrote Normal before he wrote Nobody. The mild man who turns out to be lethal, the role that made Odenkirk an unlikely action star in 2021, actually started here, and only reached us now.
The Guy Kolstad Keeps Writing
Kolstad's whole career runs on one idea: the ordinary-looking man who is quietly, catastrophically capable. John Wick was a retired assassin pulled back into the life by grief. Nobody was a bored suburban dad with a buried past and a very specific skill set. Ulysses is a beaten-down lawman who turns out to be far more than the badge suggests. Every time, the pleasure is identical. The person the room writes off ends up owning it. That one trick built a whole franchise for John Wick and earned Nobody a sequel of its own last year. Kolstad has effectively spent ten years turning a single reliable idea into a small industry.
Casting Odenkirk is the joke and the point at the same time. This is a comedy writer who became famous as Breaking Bad's saddest lawyer, then spent years as the beating heart of Better Call Saul. He was fifty-eight when Nobody turned him into an action lead, one of the least likely second acts in recent movie history, and Normal is him leaning all the way into it. Normal, written first, is the rougher and stranger draft of the idea that Nobody later smoothed into a hit. The ordinary person who turns dangerous is having a real moment on screen right now, and Kolstad has been its main author all along.
Ben Wheatley Brings the Blizzard
Wheatley is the reason the movie has teeth. The British director built his name on contained, chaotic violence, from the grim horror of Kill List to Free Fire, which was essentially one long shootout in a single warehouse. In between he took studio jobs like the Daphne du Maurier remake Rebecca and the shark sequel Meg 2, and Normal is a clean return to his rowdier mode. He points that Free Fire instinct at Normal's snowbound standoff, and the result is what more than one critic called Ben Wheatley meets John Wick. It is simple, ridiculous, and consistently fun. The supporting bench helps a lot, with Henry Winkler as a crooked mayor and Lena Headey as a bartender who has a body count of her own. The premiere came at last year's Toronto Midnight Madness, the section reserved for movies that play best with a rowdy crowd.
The secret buried under Normal is a good one, the kind of money that belongs to people far more dangerous than any small-town bank, and the film has real fun peeling it back without letting the plot slow the mayhem down. None of this is deep, and it does not pretend to be. Audiences gave it a C+, and it made only 6 million dollars in theaters back in April. That is also, oddly, why it works better at home. A 91-minute genre kick is an easy yes on the couch and a harder sell at fifteen dollars a ticket, which is exactly how a theatrical flop becomes a streaming number one. A crime that goes sideways and keeps getting funnier the worse it gets is a specific kind of pleasure, and Normal delivers it without wasting your evening. It knows what it is, ninety minutes of Odenkirk being underestimated and then very much not, and it never overstays its welcome. In an era of bloated streaming runtimes, that restraint is its own small mercy.
Normal was made before anyone knew Odenkirk could carry this kind of thing, and it shows up now as the last piece of a run he and Kolstad started years ago, long before the rest of us caught on to what the two of them were building. It lost in April and won August. For a movie about a man who is more than he looks, that is a fitting way to finally arrive.