Tatum, Craig riding high in comedic heist caper
I’m officially apologizing for some of the things I wrote about Channing Tatum several movies ago. Initially, I thought he had little to offer beyond a physique and a few dance moves, plus a few more exotic dance moves. Then, with stiffs like the ridiculous costume drama “The Eagle” behind him, he started working with better scripts and tougher directors. And now he’s a legit B-plus movie star. He has learned, gradually and assuredly, how to relax on camera and just be.
He can thank Steven Soderbergh, chiefly, for being his director mentor. “Logan Lucky” sidles into view as a relaxed, genial fairy tale about the sweetest Robin Hoods in West Virginia — likely Trump voters by demographic, but that’s the real world, not this movie’s world. Here, politics take a back seat to miscreants of pure heart and fancy and often very funny talk.
Written by someone (or someones; many think it’s Soderbergh’s wife, Jules Asner) using the name Rebecca Blunt, “Logan Lucky” offers many of the offhandedly screwy comic payoffs found in Soderbergh’s “Ocean’s 11” remake and in “Magic Mike.” Tatum centers the action as Jimmy Logan, a construction worker laid off from an excavation job at the Charlotte Motor Speedway, one of NASCAR’s biggies. Jimmy concocts a get-even scheme for revenge and profit, involving the diversion of racetrack vendor cash flying at high speeds beneath the track by way of pneumatic tubes.
His partners in crime include Jimmy’s brother, Clyde (Adam Driver), an Iraq War vet whose prosthetic hand and forearm slows him down not one jot tending bar. Jimmy’s trying to remain in good standing as father of his beauty pageant competitor daughter (Farrah Mackenzie). The girl’s short-fused mother (Katie Holmes) has had it with Jimmy’s flailing. The Logan boys, according to everyone who knew them, are cursed; the heist may be the way to dispel that curse.
The movie is a tall tale of two sets of brothers. As a demolitions expert, Daniel Craig hotfoots the story, delightfully, in the role of Joe Bang, adding the right degree of menace beneath the surface. The Logans have to bust him out of prison and then bust him back in again; Bang’s idiot brothers are played by Brian Gleeson and Jack Quaid. Seth MacFarlane, with a heavy Cockney accent, plays an energy drink mogul and the movie’s chief antagonist; Riley Keough is Jimmy’s hairdresser sister, hep to the plan and clearly smarter than the men around her. Katherine Waterston elevates a barely there supporting character, that of a community medic working out of a mobile trailer, to one of “Logan Lucky’s” reasons for success.
This is a heist picture that figures out its tone and sticks to it, without jarring bouts of violence.It’s a comedy, primarily, with labyrinthine twists and reveals. My favorite bits are a lot simpler. Exasperated at the first detailing of the robbery plan, Joe says it must be true what people are saying, that the Logan brothers are “slow in the head.” Tatum and Driver look at each other, and then back at Joe, and then, in unison, comes the kicker:
A few things hold it back from being great fun, as opposed to good fun. It’s 10 minutes too long. Hilary Swank’s turn as the crafty FBI agent on the gang’s trail is effortful rather than effortless. And the climactic flashbacks to what
happened fall short of true, exuberant invention.
“Logan Lucky” isn’t out to kill you or give you the time of your life. It’s content to give you a two-hour break from that life.