Logan Lucky is a blast
If there is something wrong with “Logan Lucky,” I simply can’t find it. After a hiatus from moviemaking, Steven Soderbergh is back with a blast of pure escapist cinema.
This terrific caper film, about working-class Joes pulling off a stupendous bank robbery at a NASCAR raceway, is a textbook example of how to create an exciting and entertaining film with the right director guiding the right talents through the right screenplay. The film takes a fairly standard premise — two inexperienced brothers recruit sketchy collaborators to crack a foolproof vault — and seasons it with sophistication and lighthearted charm.
He crams almost every scene with nutty bits of business and gets some dry laughs from the honest truth. This is set in a part of the country where folks play horseshoes at county fairs by tossing toilet seats. But there’s not a bit of condescension in the movie’s tone. It’s a chance to laugh with what Jeff Foxworthy calls “the glorious absence of sophistication,” not at it.
Channing Tatum plays Jimmy Logan, a West Virginia good old boy of the kind who needs an estimate from the barber before he gets a haircut. Jimmy is divorced but devoted to his firecracker of a little daughter, Sadie (magnetic Farrah Mackenzie).
She and her mama, Bobbie Jo (Katie Holmes), have moved up to mansion living with stepdaddy, an auto dealer tycoon. Jimmy was a high school sports hero whose bum knee sidelined him from a promising pro football career. The bad leg — considered an insurance risk — even gets him dismissed from his job, tunnelling for an excavation company.
As Sadie’s mom prepares to move across state lines to live near her husband’s newest dealership, Jimmy will need a major cash infusion to remain in touch. Conveniently, the last time he was employed, burrowing deep shafts to fix sinkholes beneath Charlotte Motor Speedway, he came close to the racetrack’s mega-vault.
Jimmy’s brother Clyde, a onehanded war veteran now tending bar, frets about the Logan curse, but signs on as a matter of blood loyalty. Sister Mellie (Riley Keough), a hairdresser with a better command of back road routes than Google Maps, joins to show that male race drivers have nothing a good woman can’t match.
The same kin ties bind the coconspirators on the raid, the Bang brothers. They’re explosives specialist Joe (Daniel Craig on a comic tear we’ve never seen before), selfproclaimed
computer savant Fish ( Jack Quaid), who knows “all the Twitters,” and little brother Sam (Brian Gleeson). The Bangs seem to have a family curse of their own, related to slapstick bumbling.
As with Soderbergh’s “Ocean’s” trilogy, “Logan Lucky” is a bank heist procedural packed with vibrant, mostly lovable characters. Jimmy tapes up a list of best practices for bank felons, and the note “Don’t get greedy” is the standout. This is a movie without a fixed villain, and the Logans don’t want to act bad, either. They don’t kick in doors or wave weapons. Jimmy’s intricate plan is the logical equal of the speedway racing footage Soderbergh cuts into the story so thrillingly.
The beauty of the movie is giving us characters to root for — and against — but no one to hate.