The trials and triumphs of the small-town lawman are a distinctly American tale. The tradition stretches at least as far back as the classical Western, with films such as the 1952 classic High Noon, in which moral duty manifests in a lone man in an obscure town facing a looming threat.It is an archetype born of a postwar American imagination, when the United States had emerged as a global superpower and bulwark against communist tyranny. Unlike the glamorous sophistication of James Bond, fashioned to revive the waning image of the British Empire, the American lawman was minimalist and prosaic.Screenwriter Derek Kolstad, who wrote the John Wick franchise and previously collaborated with Bob Odenkirk on Nobody, returns to this tradition with Normal (now streaming on Amazon Prime), another welcome vehicle for Odenkirk’s late-career transformation into a middle-aged action star. Unlike the balletic lethality of Keanu Reeves’s John Wick, Odenkirk brings a natural everyman countenance to his roles, making him disarmingly likable and relatable.
In Normal, Odenkirk plays Ulysses, an interim sheriff newly arrived in the unassuming Minnesota town of Normal, filling in after the previous sheriff’s mysterious death. The premise is something similar to Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz transplanted into the Coen brothers’ frigid and folksy world of Fargo: a dark comedy of small-town politeness curdling into criminal absurdity.
