Bob Odenkirk’s normal movies turn has landed in the UK on Sky Cinema and NOW. Normal is now available to subscribers after an April and May theatrical run that underperformed at the box office.
Odenkirk’s Ulysses lands
Odenkirk plays Ulysses, a police sheriff called into the titular Minnesotan town as cover for a deceased officer. He also serves as a producer, alongside Derek Kolstad, who shares the story credit and is credited as a writer.
The cast around him includes Henry Winkler, Lena Headey, Billy MacLellan, Brendan Fletcher, Peter Shinkoda and Jess McLeod. Ben Wheatley directs, which keeps the film in the same lane as his more aggressive genre work while giving Odenkirk another lead role built around blunt-force action rather than prestige drama.
Rotten Tomatoes and the reviews
Normal currently holds a 77% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes from 161 reviews. That level of response sits awkwardly beside the box-office result, because the film did not convert critical goodwill into a stronger theatrical turnout across April and May.
Empire Magazine described it as “Bob Odenkirk continues his late-career action streak with a satirical and stylishly violent take on the small-town-under-siege movie. Ben Wheatley meets John Wick? Oh, go on then,” while Sight & Sound called it “gleefully violent.” Time Out said, “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,” and Mark Kermode called it “riotously entertaining.”
Why UK streaming matters
wrote that “Many of its twists aren't hard to see coming, and the movie sometimes lacks the scale needed for a sprawling battle. But a moustachioed Odenkirk with a shotgun is, by most metrics, more than enough firepower for any movie.” Slant Magazine said, “Bob Odenkirk, doubling down on the volatility of his performance in Nobody, flits back and forth between taciturn badass and genuinely kind-hearted bear in the blink of an eye,” while IndieWire likened the film to a “firecracker.”
For UK viewers, the practical change is simple: the film is now on subscription streaming rather than only in cinemas. The theatrical run already showed the gap between its reception and its earnings, so this release gives the movie a second life with the audience most likely to meet it on demand, where Odenkirk, Kolstad and Wheatley’s genre exercise can be sampled without a ticket gamble.
How many viewers Normal will draw in the UK is the open question now, but the film is already in position for a better read on its audience than it got across April and May.
