Normal

Welcome to the snowbound flatlands of Normal, Minnesota. Population 1,890 – although you might want to downgrade that come the end of this unapologetic blast of old-school mayhem.

Bob Odenkirk is caretaker sheriff Ulysses Richardson, shipped into Normal after the previous lawman perished in a whiteout. ‘Good people, small problems’ is Ulysses’ appraisal after calming a petty local dispute, but something isn’t quite right. The nice lady in the yarn shop has a police radio scanner. Shotguns deck the walls of the local diner. And the cop shop armoury has enough C4 to blow up Luxembourg. A botched bank heist by two bungling drifters exposes Normal’s dirty secret: gold bullion stashed by the townsfolk in return for a cut from the Japanese mafia. The Yakuza money is Normal’s lifeblood – and now Ulysses knows, everyone in town, from the postie to the doctor, wants him dead.     

Normal is a film of two halves. The first, a smalltown mystery populated with eccentric western stock: Lena Headey’s grungy barfly, Billy MacLellan’s doofus deputy, Henry Winkler’s dodgy mayor, face like a haunted flannel. And the second? The pneumatic chakka-chak of gunfire is absolutely relentless.

A throwback to the B-movie thriller that packed the shelves of your local Blockbuster

Exploding cop cars. Exploding heads. Ninety minute runtime. No CG. Who makes these films any more? Director Ben Wheatley, whose warehouse shoot-‘em-up Free Fire showed a fluency in the grammar of action cinema, piles on the black laughs and ultraviolence. Remember those lock-and-load montages where the hero tools up? He even gives us one of those, without so much as an ironic wink. If it’s not already obvious, Normal is both a throwback to the B-movie bodycount thriller that packed the shelves of your local Blockbuster, and a no-nonsense homage to the neo-westerns of the great Walter Hill.

After two Nobody movies (Derek Kolstad wrote this one too), it’s less of a novelty seeing the hangdog Odenkirk go one-man-army. He always has the look of a man nursing a bad back, that distinctive growl like peanut shells in a concrete mixer, but when he brings a steak tenderiser to a knife fight, as he does here, you believe it’s a fight he’ll win. Normal would be a less satisfying movie without his gruff, too-old-for-this-shit heroics.

Admittedly, the dialogue could be sharper – a few too many zingers zonk out – but Normal goes about its carnage with such sincerity, it’s impossible to resist. These guys never seem to get their due, so a shout-out to unsung stunt co-ordinator Dan Iaboni, who stages the action with hot-blooded, bone-crunching force. Bring your ear plugs.

In US theaters now. In UK and Ireland cinemas May 15.