These are all movies in which adversity is a ruse, an invitation to play movies whose fluid, galvanizing pleasure often arises from the pure thrill of watching people pull off the impossible “against the odds,” against systems designed to appear insurmountable. But the subtle gulf between those films and the newest is that the latter are all about people who couldn’t be better at what they do - professionals who may even, as in the case of Logan Lucky, fail to look the part, in so many ways. The take has tended to be that No Sudden Move ( now streaming on HBO Max) is a return to familiar territory for Soderbergh, which is to say, satisfying territory: a crime caper with an all-star, hyper-charismatic cast à la the Oceans films, the more recent Logan Lucky, the verified classic Out of Sight. Things don’t quite work out that way - obviously. Doug Jones wants what’s in that vault and he needs one guy to keep the gun to Matt’s back as he secures it while the other two are assigned to babysitting duty, keeping watch over Matt’s family in the interim. Doug Jones (Fraser), who hired them, sets before them an easy enough mission: a guy named Matt Wertz (David Harbour) has access to a safe, at his work, that holds a secret. It’s Detroit, 1954, and Curt Goynes (Don Cheadle), recently out of prison and in need of money, finds himself paired up with a guy named Ronald Russo (del Toro), whose reputation precedes him, and some other guy named Charley ( Kieran Culkin), who no one seems to know or say much about. No Sudden Move is, to be sure, a crime drama in the classic sense, with a scheme running red-hot through its center, a straightforward-seeming if also somewhat obscure job, that ought to end in a handsome payday for some, a mission squarely accomplished for others, and maybe a casualty or two, if needed, but this isn’t the kind of plan predicated on drawing blood. Something else is up, here the characters, the scenario, it’s all a little looser, a little more haphazard, than at first appears. F or all its immediately apparent polish - and the automatic pleasure of seeing the likes of Don Cheadle, Benicio Del Toro, Brendan Fraser and others up to no good and clearly at odds - Soderbergh’s newest effort felt, for a little while, like it was reaching, wearing its coolness a bit uneasily.īut coolness isn’t the endgame, or at least, it’s not what dominates, no matter how smooth and tempered it looks, no matter how briskly stylish its music, written by David Holmes (who also wrote music for Soderbergh’s Oceans films and Out of Sight, an immediately recognizable vibe), wants to make it seem. The notion of a crime drama directed by Steven Soderbergh bears with it all manner of expectation, not unlike when you mix “gangster” with “Scorsese.” It’s all a bit 1 + 1 = 2 you can feel when the math is off, and you can also feel when the deviations are deliberate. I wasn’t sure about No Sudden Move, at first.
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