Checked out the new heist film Logan Lucky, directed by Steven Soderberg. Soderberg usually does genre films in an art house style, except for the Oceans 11 movies which were basically as main stream as he gets. This film is a heist flick like the Oceans movies only set in West Virginia and North Carolina. Someone in the movie refers to it as Oceans 7-11. Or the Hillbilly Heist.
I’ll be blunt about this… I didn’t “get” this movie. I don’t know what it was trying to be, I didn’t know what it was trying to do, and I didn’t get what it was trying to say. I was left baffled as to what it was doing. This may just be me but I found it unfocused, slow, and not very funny. I didn’t think it was a terrible film though. Not entirely unwatchable even though it takes a long time to go nowhere.
The film has a good cast including Daniel Craig playing a southern convicted prisoner and explosive expert. He’s recruited by Channing Tatum and Adam Driver, brothers who are planning a heist on the North Carolina Motor Speedway (even if that means robbing NASCAR which is un-American, one character says). They are joined by others including Hillary Swank, Seth MacFarline, Katherine Waterston, Sebastian Stan, Dwight Yokum, and more. It’s a good cast.
But they are inserted into one of the most slow-paced, energy-less heist films. A heist film should be peppier than this drag of a movie. I’ve seen an argument than the Oceans movies are energetic because they are set in Vegas and this one is slow as molasses because it’s set in the South. I dunno about that argument but, if true, that doesn’t make the movie any better.
The film is also a comedy and I recognize the existence of humor in the flick, but I don’t think much of it worked. It was partly due to the pacing and timing and partly the writing. But mainly it was the pacing/timing… it was just just lugubrious. Jokes that should have been funny fall flat continuously. It’s as though Soderberg had once heard of this “comedy” thing and was trying it for the first time.
And there ya go. I can’t say I hated the movie entirely. I wasn’t too bored by it because I kept on wondering what it was going to do next. That is until it reached the natural end and kept going another thirty minutes. Ugh. I can’t recommend the flick yet I didn’t hate it. Not entirely.
Score: 71