Logan Lucky offbeat heist adventure
Oddball anti-heist movie offers offbeat charms
Director Steven Soderbergh steals critics’ best hope for a snarky reaction to his new movie when he has a character refer to the robbers in Logan Lucky as “Ocean’s 7-11.” Featuring not one but two tunes from John Denver, and nary a firearm in sight, this might be one of the most relaxed bank-vault jobs in the history of cinema.
So moviegoers take note: If you go for the adrenalin rush, you might want to bring your own Red Bull. There is fast driving but there are no police chases, and fisticuffs that mostly take place off-screen. The shopping-for-supplies montage is set in a suburban Lowe’s and the scale model of the criminals’ target is made out of pizza-box cardboard.
Oh, and their explosive device is crafted from such improbably innocuous ingredients that even the film’s stars aren’t buying it, requiring munitions expert Joe Bang (Daniel Craig, sporting bleach-blond hair and a somewhere-in-the-Carolinas accent) to chalk up some chemical formulae by way of explanation. Joe Bang’s initials match, but James Bond he ain’t.
His co-conspirators are brothers Jimmy and Clyde Logan, played by Channing Tatum and Adam Driver. Clyde (Driver), an Iraq war vet and one-armed bartender, is the more philosophical of the two, though his philosophy tends to focus on “the Logan curse” that he thinks haunts his family, including their sister, Mellie (Riley Keough), and Jimmy’s young daughter, who lives with her mom (Katie Holmes).
Jimmy (Tatum) is the pragmatist: When he gets laid off from a mining outfit that’s been hired to shore up the sub-basements of a major NASCAR speedway in North Carolina, he decides to burgle the track’s vault. He announces this plan to his brother in four syllables. Some people have safe words. Jimmy has a danger word. It’s “cauliflower.”
Soderbergh loudly announced his retirement from filmmaking several years ago, but like a movie character drawn back for that one last score, the director of Magic Mike, the Ocean’s 11 trilogy and the under-appreciated 2009 film The Informant! is back in the big chair. Working from a script by newcomer Rebecca Blunt (a scribe so reclusive some have suggested the name is a pseudonym for Soderbergh himself ), he’s crafted an almost anti-heist movie, its stately pacing more in keeping with a drawing-room drama than a NASCAR money grab.
His characters include Jack (son of Dennis) Quaid and Brian (son of Brendan) Gleeson as Joe’s brothers, who have about one wit between them. Continuing his penchant for peculiar casting choices, he also gives us an almost unrecognizable Seth MacFarlane as a sports-drink magnate; Dwight Yoakam as the warden of the prison where Joe has been incarcerated; and Hilary Swank as an FBI agent who swings in to solve the crime, shaking down suspects like a dog with a bone and grumbling: “I hate airtight alibis.”
It all adds up to an uneven story that manages to be far more entertaining than a bare-bones description would suggest. Take Jimmy’s bizarre run-in with a public-health nurse played by Katherine (daughter of Sam) Waterston, who gives him a tetanus shot, a My Little Pony BandAid and a wistful look that has Jimmy and audience members alike wishing she wouldn’t leave.
Or the inmates’ attempts to cover for Joe’s brief prison breakout, which turns into an impromptu critique of George R.R. Martin’s delay in completing his Game of Thrones books. These scenes contain an internal logic and humour that doesn’t quite match the rest of the movie, but doesn’t really hurt it either. It’s like wine and cheese: nothing like one another, but an excellent pairing nonetheless.
Logan Lucky won’t be to everyone’s liking. But thanks to a weird release coincidence, those with more mainstream aspirations can head to The Hitman’s Bodyguard, while viewers wanting a more edgy fraternal-robbery story can take in Good Time, which opens next week in many markets.
Then again, this one offers pleasures you won’t find anywhere else.
And isn’t the best heist one where you go after that one-ofa-kind treasure?
Moviegoers take note: If you go for the adrenalin rush, you might want to bring your own Red Bull.
“Populist Pictures” reads the buzzer to Steven Soderbergh’s Tribeca office. You might easily mistake it as ironic. It’s a grand title for a little nameplate on an otherwise nondescript Manhattan building. But he means it. Four years after dramatically quitting moviemaking, Soderbergh is back with Logan Lucky. His hiatus — in the end so abbreviated as to be nonexistent — hasn’t been spent toying with a Major Artistic Statement to be showered in Oscar buzz. (He long ago lost his taste for self-serious prestige films.) Nor has he drastically remade himself as a filmmaker. Logan Lucky is a heist movie so similar to his Ocean’s Eleven films that the more down-and-out West Virginia characters of his caper even refer to their plot as “Ocean’s 7-11.”
“I thought the first line of every review would be, ‘He came out of retirement for this?’ ” said Soderbergh.
“Of course my answer to that would have been: The only thing I would have come out of retirement for is to make something like this. I wasn’t going to come out of retirement and not make something fun. Why would I do that?”
Instead, Soderbergh wants to prove a point. When he said goodbye to the movie business four years ago (and went off, in a filmmaking marathon, to direct every episode of the acclaimed Showtime series The Knick), he exited fed up with a risk-adverse Hollywood unwilling to innovate, to problem solve, to shake up anything.
Logan Lucky isn’t just a comeback movie, it’s a grand experiment. Soderbergh independently financed the film, selling distribution rights to foreign territories to pay for the budget and then making ancillary deals (like Amazon) to pay for prints and ads. While ballooning marketing costs have made little beside franchise films appealing to major studios, Soderbergh believes he can put out Logan Lucky with a more modest marketing approach centred on the 10 days before release and the social-media followings of its stars — notably Channing Tatum.
It’s a way to prove that the broadappeal movie can be made by a filmmaker with a plan, without committee or corporation
“I’ve been very vocal about my issues and it’s an opportunity to learn some stuff. And I’m prepared for any scenario. But at least we got to do it the way we wanted to do it,” says Soderbergh.
“And that’s a win. We’re going to learn something. We may learn a lot. I’m hoping it works so I can continue to put my work through this system and have other likeminded filmmakers put their work through this system.”
“We don’t need another boutique distributor,” he adds. “This is designed for wide-release movies. This isn’t an art-house proposition.”
Movie financing arrangements are infamously Byzantine, but Soderbergh has set up an account that anyone who has put money into the movie can log on to and check to see the movie’s expenses, grosses and their cut. The whole scheme is more than a little like the plot of Logan Lucky, in which an out-of-work miner (Tatum) rallies a team to rip off a NASCAR track. A tongue-in-cheek line at the end of the credits reads: “No one was robbed during the making of this film except you.”
“We don’t know whether it’s going to work or not. We certainly hope like hell it does. We’ll know after a couple weeks. One way or another, we’ll get to prove our point,” said executive producer Dan Fellman, Warner Bros.’ former distribution chief. He anticipates the film will be in 2,800 theatres, with many in the industry keenly following the results.
“There’s a lot of people watching, I can tell you that,” says Fellman.
Ahead of the big theft — er, release date — Soderbergh has less the fidgety energy of someone about to rob a bank than the calmness of a mastermind. “Everything’s gone right so far,” he says.