Logan Lucky

Synopsis: Two brothers (Channing Tatum and Adam Driver) from West Virginia attempt to pull off a heist during a NASCAR race in North Carolina with the assistance of safe-breaker Joe Bang (Daniel Craig).

Given that he’s had four years to think about it (his last feature film was Side Effects in 2013) you’d be forgiven for wondering why Steven Soderbergh decided to go with this caper comedy which takes the slick format of his Oceans series, relocates it to the Deep South and populates it with dumb-ass hillbilly stereotypes played by a gaggle of A-listers like Channing Tatum, Katie Holmes and Daniel Craig as well as indie-film favourite, Adam Driver, Elvis’s grand-daughter Riley Keog and C&W star Dwight Yoakam with Hilary Swank making an appearance as an FBI investigator

The idea was clearly to have a bit of fun, which maybe Soderbergh had while making the film, but the finished product's effect is less than amusing.

For a start Southern white trash may well deserve the caricatural ridiculing of which they have long been the target but it feels more than a little unkind when perpetrated by wealthy Hollywood stars and even more so when the joke doesn’t really come off . The closest it comes to doing so is when played to excess by non-marquee names, Jack Quaid (the son of Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid), and Brian Gleeson as Joe Bang’s “born-again” nephews although there is some enjoyment to be had from the performance of a well-outside-his-Bond-persona Daniel Craig.

Set the lampooning aside and you’re left with the heist aspect of the film. Here the script by Rachel Blunt (which may or may not be a pseudonym for a person or persons unknown) has significant issues in delivering a plot that not only depends upon innumerable contingencies perfectly aligning but a scheme which is master-minded by a character who is supposed to be a congenital lunk-head. On one level it's entertainingly inventive but by any real-world criteria it is also palpably preposterous. Soderbergh, however, unspools it with such breathless pacing (some of the scenes are cut so short that one can't tell what is going on) that all you can respond with is “OK, if you say so”. 

I wasn’t impressed with the recently released action comedy Baby Driver but at least I could follow the story.  By the time of this film's ending-with-twist I had little idea what was going on or what I had to show for the past two hours, I'm still wondering.  

Want more about this film?

Want something different?