Since coming out of a brief retirement from filmmaking following the release of his Liberace biopic for HBO “Behind the Candelabra,” Steven Soderbergh has been awfully busy. Amongst his many projects, he shot, edited, and directed two entire seasons of Cinemax‘s overlooked medical drama “The Knick,” directed an off-Broadway play called “The Library,” edited and shot male stripper sequel “Magic Mike XXL,” and released a series of weird fan edits of famous films, including “Heaven’s Gate” and “2001: A Space Odyssey,” plus “Psychos,” a mirrored mash-up of both Alfred Hitchcock‘s original film and Gus Van Sant‘s remake. What started off as a retirement quickly felt more like a hiatus. With “Logan Lucky,” Soderbergh has returned to the medium and a genre he’s clearly comfortable with, but with an added confidence and a renewed investment in character as well as craft. It’s good to have him back.
In “Lucky Logan” Channing Tatum and Adam Driver play brothers who decide they’ve had enough and are going to do something about it. Tatum, as Jimmy Logan, is fired from a construction job repairing the infrastructure underneath a NASCAR track because an injury has made him a liability; he’s got a young daughter who is prepping for a beauty pageant and an ex-wife (Katie Holmes) who hates his guts. Driver is Jimmy Logan, a bartender who is missing half of his arm thanks to an injury sustained fighting overseas. They hatch a plan to rob the NASCAR stadium, on a slow day, with the help of their sister Mellie (Riley Keough) and Joe Bang (Daniel Craig), an explosives expert currently incarcerated in a federal penitentiary. Of course, the foolproof plan soon goes to hell and everybody involved has to find a way to wriggle out of it.
Soderbergh has said that one of the things that drew him to the script (initially given to him so that he could suggest potential directors) was that it was the anti-“Ocean’s Eleven;” that it was hardscrabble and rough where those movies were slick and glamorous. (In one of the more self-reflexive moments of the movie someone describes the heist as “Ocean’s 7-11.”) And it’s true: these are characters who barely know how to use computers, who communicate via payphone because they haven’t paid their cell phone bills on time, and whose idea of stealth infiltration involves throwing a homemade grenade at something electronic. It’s refreshingly lo-fi and charming and the film never gives off the sensation that Soderbergh is looking down on these salt-of-the-earth characters. There’s never any condescension and the truly unforgivable characters are the people in power who make those under them feel unwanted (like a terribly miscast Seth MacFarlane as a pompous race owner).
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And really it’s the performances that do a lot of the heavy lifting in “Logan Lucky.” Both Tatum and Driver (as men obsessed with the supposed unluckiness of their family) are terrific leads, sympathetic and warm, with Keough turning in one of the more surprising roles as their motor-mouthed sister. The central trio are surrounded by a constellation of supporting players who are just as game to be goofy and humanly flawed (notably Jack Quaid and Brian Gleeson as Joe’s dumb-ass hick brothers and Sebastian Stan as a Zen NASCAR racer). Other actors (like Hilary Swank, Katherine Waterston and Dwight Yoakam) just seem happy to be invited to the party.
But amongst these amazing performances, Daniel Craig really needs to be singled out. You’ve never seen Craig like this before, both literally (with his hair cropped and died into a spiky blonde fin) and in terms of his personality. In “Logan Lucky,” Craig has shed all the brooding gloom that has followed him around like a tiny raincloud since signing up for his ultra-serious Bond. He gets to be bouncy and buoyant, everything he does seems charged with electricity that only Craig has access to. What’s more – he’s actually having fun. It’s impossible to not fall in love with him and it’s hard to think of the last time one of his performances had that kind of impact. It feels revelatory. Soderbergh’s jokey “And introducing …” credit for the actor feels oddly appropriate; this is Craig reborn and renewed.
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As for Soderbergh, this isn’t much of a departure stylistically. He’s continuing his post-“Che” run of making artistically ambitious, commercially appealing enterprises. (It should also be noted that Soderbergh’s new distribution company, Fingerprint, will help with “Logan Lucky’s” release.) If anything his visual palette has gone through a slight shift; the wintery blues and grays of “Contagion” and “The Knick” have been swapped for sunnier golds and yellows, and he’s placed a greater emphasis on character over plot. (There’s a remarkably touching moment that rivals “Okja” for 2017’s most heart-tugging sequence set to an old John Denver song.) And while there’s no explicit political text or subtext, it’s hard not to read into a story about a bunch of country boys who, exhausted and let down by both the government and private enterprise, strike back by crippling a symbol of shit-kicking entertainment. More explicitly, this is a movie about the people who voted Trump into office only to have the rug pulled out from under them in a continued and sustained effort to old serve those at the highest rungs of power. What other choice do they have than to rob the fuckers back?
There are those that will undoubtedly find “Logan Lucky” too breezy. There is the assumption, of course, that Soderbergh returning to cinema will be some sort of paradigm shift. That just isn’t the case. This is more of a victory lap than anything else. It’s a filmmaker who has gathered performers at the top of their game (and Seth MacFarlane) to play. And play they do. This is a brilliantly constructed, whip-smart, and laugh-out-loud-funny romp from a filmmaker whose precision and craft is nearly unparalleled. It’s hard to think of a movie this year that has been as singularly delightful, one that, with each passing moment, reveals something charming or odd or real. It hasn’t been that long since Soderbergh stopped directing movies but it feels like forever. And with “Logan Lucky,” he beautifully exhibits everything we’ve been missing. [A]