Bob Odenkirk plays Ulysses, a former Chicago police officer who arrives in Normal, Minnesota to serve as interim sheriff after the previous one dies under murky circumstances. As the Financial Times Weekend (16-17 May 2026) says: “The name Normal is the first gag of many”. The town he inherits is already hollowed out: shuttered shops, a shrinking population, and a civic culture worn thin by years of economic erosion.
He meets the expected gallery of eccentrics — the leery mayor, the flirty barmaid, the little old lady who runs the haberdashery, the frenetic sheriff’s department — all sketched with the breezy shorthand Wheatley favours. But as Ulysses digs deeper, he uncovers a criminal conspiracy involving weapons trafficking, corrupt officials, and a violent gang with Yakuza ties.
The plot is wildly unrealistic — a chain of coincidences and conveniently timed revelations, as well as consequences implausibly avoided — but the film isn’t built for plausibility. It’s built for impact.
The Mayor — Henry Winkler’s smiling rot, and the logic of complicity
If Normal has a single character who embodies the town’s moral collapse, it’s Mayor Kibner, played with unnerving geniality by Henry Winkler. The magazine review calls his role a “miss,” but that undersells what Wheatley is doing. Kibner isn’t a villain in the theatrical sense. He’s something more familiar — the small‑town politician who has learned to survive by compromising his ideals.
His justifications are the most chilling part of his character. He doesn’t see himself as corrupt; he sees himself as pragmatic. In his mind, the town is dying anyway — the factories gone, the tax base evaporated, the young people leaving — so why not make accommodations with the forces that still have money and muscle?
His logic is the logic of slow collapse:
- If the system no longer works, you improvise.
- If the law can’t protect the town, you find someone who can.
- If the people are scared, you give them the illusion of order.
Every compromise becomes a “necessary evil.” Every concession is framed as stewardship. That’s what makes him dangerous. He rationalises. He persuades himself — and tries to persuade others — that bending the rules is the only way to keep the town afloat.
Winkler plays him with a salesman’s warmth — the handshake, the reassuring smile, the tone of a man who wants you to believe he’s doing his best. But behind that affability is a hollowed‑out sense of responsibility. He’s not leading the town; he’s managing its decline, smoothing over the cracks, and telling himself that survival justifies everything.
In a film full of gunfire, Kibner is the quietest form of violence: the violence of corruption, of a leader who stops believing in the very idea of public duty. He is the most interesting character in the film.
Complicity — when a whole town looks away
One of the film’s sharper, if underdeveloped, ideas is how the vast majority of the townsfolk become complicit in the corruption that’s consuming them. Not through grand conspiracies, but through the small, familiar mechanisms of decline:
- People look away because they’re tired.
- Businesses cooperate because they need the money.
- Civic leaders bend because they’ve lost faith in the institutions they’re meant to defend.
- And most strikingly, law enforcement fractures — some officers quietly aiding the criminal network, others simply refusing to intervene.
This isn’t the melodramatic “town gone bad” of old Westerns. It’s something more recognisable: a community worn down by economic erosion, fear, and the slow normalisation of wrongdoing. Collapse isn’t sudden; it’s cumulative.
A film built for set‑pieces
Let’s be honest: Normal is structured like a chain of violent dioramas. Every ten minutes, another meticulously engineered action sequence erupts. The magazine review singles out the “nasty brawl in a hardware store,” and it’s true — Wheatley stages it with bruising precision.
Cars flip, walls splinter, bullets stitch the air. The choreography is muscular and relentless.
But the rhythm becomes narcotic. The violence stops shocking and starts numbing. You drift through it as if it were weather — something that simply happens, without moral weight.
Even the script’s attempts at levity — including the much‑mocked “physics, bitch” line — land with a thud, a reminder that the film’s tonal ambitions exceed its writing.
What does this violence do to the mind?
This is the film’s unintended question. When brutality is constant, stylised, and unmoored from consequence, the viewer adapts. The mind slides into a state where bodies falling become part of the scenery. It’s not the gore that unsettles — it’s the ease with which you absorb it.
The film wants to warn us about societal collapse, but its real message is about desensitisation: how quickly the extraordinary becomes ordinary when packaged as entertainment.
The decline of American towns — the film’s accidental truth
Where Normal brushes against something real is in its landscapes. The shuttered main street, the empty factories, the sense of a place abandoned long before the first gunshot — these images carry more weight than any monologue.
This is the quiet violence the film never quite confronts: the slow hollowing‑out of American towns, the economic erosion that leaves communities brittle and combustible. In those moments, you glimpse the film it could have been — a meditation on civic decay rather than a catalogue of ballistic choreography.
But the camera never lingers. There’s always another firefight waiting.
