Category: reviews

Film review: Nobody

Picked this up on Sky for the eye-watering sum of £13.99 (rental!) are my friends kept raving about it. Was it worth it? …
It’s the same fella who wrote John Wick, and it shows. We’ve got the same slow start, then about twenty minutes in, the movie finds its pace and its pretty much non-stop knives and bullets until the final showdown, when it really lets loose.

So, here’s the upshot: Hutch Mansell (brilliantly played by Bob Odenkirk) lives a somewhat mundane life as a book-keeper for his father-in-law’s manufacturing business. The aforementioned mundane life takes a turn for sadistic when Hutch’s house is burgled and he slowly unravels, bringing to bear the skills from his former profession: clean-up specialist for the CIA.

Needless to say, if you love John Wick then you’ll get along with Nobody, just fine. Thinking about, I think I preferred Nobody; it has a raw, visceral quality about, whereas John Wick was more stylised.

Definitely worth the £13.99 (rental!) sticker fee if you’re really into this sort of thing.

A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka

Another recommendation out of the blue (probably because I’d just read Sweet Sweet Revenge Ltd, and I can kind of see the similarities). The story isn’t anything too strenuous: two Ukrainian sisters go to war with the gold-digger who has married their elderly father. But the author, writing as the younger of the sisters, wraps the story of around the complex family saga that begins almost a hundred years ago, travels across Eastern Europe and finishes in Peterborough – though not necessarily in that order.

And then there’s the history of tanks and tractors …

It’s a lively read, though it does have its dips. I almost gave up on it near the middle, but something happened (can’t say what) that piqued my interest, and then it really started motoring. I’m glad I stuck with it, otherwise I would’ve missed a treat of a courtroom battle.

The characters are … adequate, I think; a little hard to separate in places, (especially the narrator’s husband who seemed a little flat to me), but do enough work to keep the reader interested in what happens to them.

It does have moments that’ll make you laugh, and others that’ll terrify you about getting old, but all in all, I think it lacked surprises, if that makes sense. Everyone behaved exactly as you expected them to; there was no great epiphany, and I wasn’t sure that anyone really learned anything or were changed by their experience. So, I’d say it was an enjoyable read, though somewhat unfulfilling.