How Bob Odenkirk and Derek Kolstad Built Something ‘Normal’ and Why That’s the Best Compliment Possible

Bob Odenkirk and Derek Kolstad reunite for Normal ; a darkly funny neo-Western that proves the Nobody star is just getting started. In theaters now.

There’s a moment in Normal where interim sheriff Ulysses Richardson walks into a bank robbery expecting paperwork and walks out as public enemy number one — betrayed by his own deputies, hunted by a Yakuza network, and squaring off against a sweet old granny with a shotgun.

It happens fast. It’s absurd. It earns every second. And it could only happen in a Bob Odenkirk movie.

The man who spent two decades being the funniest person in every writers’ room has quietly become one of the most compelling action stars working today — and his new collaboration with John Wick architect Derek Kolstad, directed by Ben Wheatley and now in theaters, makes the case definitively. Bob Odenkirk action films have become their own genre, and Normal is the best argument yet for why that matters.

From the Writers’ Room to the War Zone

Bob Odenkirk wrote for Saturday Night Live starting in 1987, and later for Conan O’Brien’s Late Night — rooms where timing isn’t a metaphor, it’s a survival skill.

That training shows up in ways most action movies never think to use. Odenkirk doesn’t play tough. He plays a man who isn’t tough, trying desperately to make the math work and somehow coming out the other side. The comedy is structural, not decorative. It’s in the gap between what Ulysses expects and what Normal, Minnesota, actually is.

Better Call Saul Taught Him Everything About Playing a Man in Over His Head

Saul Goodman spent six seasons being the smartest person in the room, right up until he wasn’t. Ulysses Richardson spends about fifteen minutes in Normal before the same thing happens to him.

Six seasons as Jimmy McGill, a man whose charm was his only armor in a world of real violence, was a graduate course in calibrated desperation. Odenkirk learned to play intelligence under pressure, resourcefulness without brute force. That’s exactly what Normal needs. When Ulysses has to negotiate with bank robbers while his own cops are shooting at him, the scene works because the actor behind it spent years finding the small beats inside chaos.

Nobody Proved the Concept. Normal Raises the Stakes.

Nobody opened in March 2021 to $6.7 million on a pandemic weekend and grew into a cult hit that spawned a 2025 sequel. It was the proof of concept: Odenkirk as action lead isn’t a gimmick. It’s a genuine creative proposition.

Normal strips the superhero mythology entirely. Ulysses isn’t a former assassin with buried skills. He’s an ordinary cop in an extraordinary mess. That’s a harder movie to make, and a more interesting one. Derek Kolstad, who built the entire John Wick universe from a script about a man avenging his dog, knows exactly how to make the mundane lethal. His co-story credit here alongside Odenkirk isn’t a marketing footnote, it’s the engine.

Ben Wheatley Was the Right Call at the Right Moment

Wheatley’s filmography reads like a dare: Kill List (2011), Sightseers (2012), High Rise (2015), Free Fire (2016). British genre cinema at its most uncompromising.

After a detour through a Rebecca remake and a giant shark movie, Wheatley needed a win. So did Normal. They found each other.

His instinct is always to push a genre past its own comfort zone — to find where the rules break and see what’s underneath. Normal‘s snowbound Minnesota setting, its population of compromised townsfolk, its Yakuza subplot arriving in the middle of a small-town bank robbery — that’s Wheatley territory. He turns the ordinary sinister, then funny, then sinister again before you can recalibrate. Odenkirk and Kolstad handed him the keys to a very specific vehicle and he drove it directly off a cliff. In the best possible way.

What Normal Actually Means for the Career Arc

The RT consensus lands at 75% with a Metacritic score of 62; critics recognized it as B-movie craft executed at a high level. It’s not Nobody‘s breakout numbers and it won’t be. But the creative coalition here: Odenkirk as co-writer, co-producer, and star; Kolstad as architect; Wheatley as director, represents something the industry doesn’t produce often enough: a genre film made by people who genuinely love the genre and have the skills to push it somewhere new.

Bob Odenkirk spent his first career making other people funny. He’s spending his second career making himself dangerous. Normal isn’t the end of that arc. It’s the middle. And that’s exactly where it gets interesting.

Normal is in theaters now. See it on the biggest screen available. It earns the space.