How do you handcuff a man who only has one hand?
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| Photo credit: Logan Lucky/IMDb |
Two courtroom guards stare at each other and ponder that question sheepishly as Clyde Logan (Adam Driver), an Iraq War veteran who lost his hand in the line of duty, is sentenced to a short stint in prison in Logan Lucky, director Steven Soderbergh’s return to feature filmmaking after his 2013 “retirement.” The moment is played for laughs, but it’s warm. Soderbergh, who serves as his own cinematographer, is not interested in mocking anyone. The camera stands near the guards and Clyde, who has no clue how to help them get out of this predicament, as everyone shrugs. The camera is situated neither above nor below anyone, because there are neither heroes to idolize nor villains to sneer at. Rather, they are ordinary, hapless folks who can’t understand how they got themselves into an embarrassing situation. And Soderbergh wants us to be as embarrassed as they are.
We're with them
So goes Logan Lucky, a delightful heist film about how everything can and does go wrong, and all the tiny (humanizing) humiliations along the way. But if you’ve got the right people by your side who are willing to fail along with you, you might just scrape by. The movie is one of those people. It is a friend to its characters, a group of people who are more crime dabblers than career criminals, as they plan to rob the vault at a North Carolina NASCAR track.
Led by Clyde’s brother, Jimmy (Channing Tatum), a construction worker who has been laid off because his limp makes him an insurance liability on the job site repairing the speedway’s sinkhole problem, the crew comes together around a plan that is both brilliantly rock solid and destined to fail multiple times -- Jimmy hangs a bank-robbing checklist on his fridge that lays out all the times a job will fail before it theoretically, ultimately prevails. These two blue collar brothers (Clyde is a bartender in a sleepy roadside joint) don’t look like much, but they have a knack for the logistics of how to rip off a major American sporting event. Their deceptively casual look and attitude is reflected in the crew they enlist. It includes their getaway-driver-beautician sister, Mellie (Riley Keough), and “in-car-cer-ay-ted” former business associate and explosives expert Joe Bang (Daniel Craig, who has the time of his life as a mischievous Southern goofball with the intelligence of a Nobel-Prize-winning chemist). Their goal is to bust Clyde and Joe out of prison, to get into the speedway vault, and get out without being detected on the largest race of the year -- LeAnn Rimes sings the national anthem, so you know it’s a big deal.
Much like he did in Ocean’s 11, 12, and 13, Soderbergh takes glee in showing a plan’s execution, although he is much less interested in the planning stages of the Logan family and associates’ caper than he was in Danny Ocean and his pals’. The heist’s end goal and the checklist on Jimmy’s fridge is all the audience needs to know about what they’re about to witness. This allows Soderbergh’s camera plenty of time to become a friend to these people, who could so easily be portrayed as caricatures of rednecks but constantly confound expectations, just as happens in real life when you spend time to get to know people you might write off otherwise. Despite having every twist and turn of their job planned, they are the victims of a “Logan curse” that Clyde obsesses over and is convinced has ruined his family’s (literal) fortunes for generations. Their aunt once lost a winning lottery ticket, Clyde’s hand is gone after he did the right thing by serving his country, his blue-chip quarterback brother’s professional football career never took off because of the injury that gave him his limp, and they seem unable to keep a family together. Jimmy’s precocious daughter, Sadie (Farrah Mackenzie), lives with her mom (Katie Holmes) with her more successful stepfather, a car salesman played by David Denman.
In the hands of a less talented screenwriter, this setup would be a rather empty driver of audience sympathy or worse, a lame mechanism to pass judgement on the “mean” people in the protagonist’s life. But Rebecca Blunt’s (who may or may not be a real person, according to her IMDb page) script twists this into something far more deeply relatable. Instead of focusing solely on how sad life is for Jimmy because his family fell apart, Blunt and Soderbergh take care to show how everyone in this splintered family still gets along. There’s casual ribbing and some thinly veiled eye rolling directed at (and from) all parties, but everyone spends time together to raise a kid in a loving environment. They take her to her talent show practices, invite each other to the movies to get more Sadie time, and attend the same social events as if this is just the way things are. It’s a strange, somewhat embarrassing situation for all involved, just like the flummoxed court guards, but Blunt and Soderbergh only care about generating real, earned empathy rather than scoring quick and cheap points.
This is the stuff that makes one look back on a movie with fondness. The set pieces related to the heist are daring, endlessly entertaining, executed with the easy professionalism of a master filmmaker, and riotously (literally, in one case) funny, but it’s these small character moments that make all the difference. Without them, uproarious moments like Clyde’s prosthetic hand being sucked into an industrial-grade vacuum or Joe Bang using a cinderblock-lined wall as a chalkboard to explain to Jimmy and Clyde the science of how to turn gummy bears into explosives wouldn’t have the impact that they do. If we were laughing at them, saying, “Oh, those backwards hicks,” and looking down at them, Logan Lucky wouldn’t resonate. But because the movie is most concerned with staying with these people as they bumble, it becomes about identification. We are along for the hapless ride. Every bump in the road goes our way or against us. We’re lucky to spend time with the Logan crew and to have Soderbergh back on the big screen.
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Writer: Rebecca Blunt
Starring: Channing Tatum, Adam Driver, Daniel Craig, Riley Keough, Katie Holmes, Seth MacFarlane, Hilary Swank, Katherine Waterston, Farrah Mackenzie
Rating: 4/5 stars
Available in theaters now
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