Soderbergh’s crime caper makes for a cosy return to big screen
Logan Lucky
To quote one of the dimmer characters in its attempted speedway robbery, Logan Lucky is a “vagrant fliolation” – namely of the “retirement” from film-making Steven Soderbergh announced four years ago. His last feature was Side Effects in 2013, and he’s turned to TV in the interim, with HBO’S Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra, and two seasons of Cinemax’s hospital drama The Knick.
Logan Lucky is such a cosy return to the big screen – comfort-zone Soderbergh, you could certainly say – that it makes his absence feel like a drop in the ocean. The whole game plan goes like clockwork. There’s a small fortune to be stolen, a jostling ensemble needed to get together and do it. The hows, the wheres, the whys and the whens are stacked up with perfect dexterity by a showrunner who’s been around the block.
The day of the Coca-cola 600 Nascar race at Charlotte Motor Speedway is chosen, because huge footfall from those attending means wads of cash in the racetrack’s vault. Breaking in, though, will need the services of Joe Bang (Daniel Craig), a white-haired, not-to-be-messed-with safe-cracker who is currently serving jail time for his prior misdeeds.
Craig is visibly enjoying himself in a film role. Breaking him out, and then back in, without the authorities having a clue becomes the order of the day, and Bang submits to this proposal with something down the aggressive end of a bemused shrug. He hasn’t got much to lose. Tatum, Driver and Keogh are so well-cast as siblings – their roles in Rebecca Blunt’s script so gently shaded, too – that you’d watch a sequel, at least in the hope it wasn’t as wilfully indulgent as Ocean’s Twelve.
Ever since Out of Sight (1998), Soderbergh has had a gift for slipping humanely under the skin of a genre, alert to texture more than cold technique. He rarely sells any of his characters down the river for a cheap laugh.