After a four-year voluntary semi-retirement, Steven Soderbergh
seems to be pretty rusty. His new picture, Logan Lucky, is about an elaborate
scheme by a bunch of Southern rustics to rip off mounds of cash from the house
during the running of NASCAR’s Coca Cola 600 race in North Carolina. Soderbergh
is a past master of the heist genre, and as anyone who has seen Ocean’s 11, Ocean’s 12 or Ocean’s 13 can
attest, he knows how to handle complicated larceny schemes with finesse. And
the plan in Logan Lucky is certainly
tricky enough to be intriguing.
Plus, the movie is stuffed to the hilt with pretty big
stars, including Channing Tatum in the lead as Jimmy Logan, an out of work West
Virginia miner with big ideas; Adam Driver as his taciturn bartender brother
Clyde; Riley Keough as their hairdresser sister Mellie; Daniel Craig as a
vaunted safe-cracker (looking like an aging, redneck version of Billy Idol); Hillary
Swank as a “Special Agent” investigator; plus Katie Holmes, Katherine
Waterston, Seth MacFarlane, Dwight Yoakum, Sebastian Stan and more.
So you think it’d be good, right? Sadly no.
Logan Lucky is
clearly intended as a comedy, and it just is not very funny. I chuckled a
couple of times over its two-hour run-time and smiled a few times more, but
these reactions were more than matched by my winces and suppressed groans at the
film’s numerous failed comic situations and characterizations. My companion
was, if anything, less amused. Neither was the rest of the crowd at the opening
night screening last Thursday (except for a couple of guys right behind us, who
seemed hell-bent on making the best of it, but even they only laughed out loud a
couple of times).
You know how laughter is contagious? Well so is its opposite
– an audience that’s dead quiet during what’s supposed to be a funny scene. Maybe
I was just with a dud audience. but I don’t think that was the problem. I only
entertain the thought because some critics are saying that Logan Lucky is a very funny movie. These are probably the same folks who thought
the Coen Brothers’ Hail Caesar (2016)
was hilarious. Wrong on both counts!
Unlike the Ocean series of movies, there is little suspense in
Logan Lucky to excite us once the scheme is under way. This is because the
characters are not particularly interesting or charismatic, notwithstanding the
star power of many of the actors, so we don’t care much about them. Virtually
all the characters – with the exception of
Tatum’s Jimmy Logan, are broad caricatures or just cartoonish (but
unfunny) nitwits. Nor are there any
credible bad guys to root against. Most
of the attempts at humor are tied to our willingness to laugh at small town, working
class Southern folks as hicks, hillbillies and silly rednecks. HaHaHa.
Another problem is in the execution. Specifically, the
accents are all over the map. The variety of mangled drawls - from red-neck to
indecipherable in the case of Daniel Craig, soberly rendered but ridiculous in
the case Adam Driver - is diverting in the worst way. As were some of the men’s
wigs and hair styles if they can be called that. As an unfunny clownish
race-car driver, MacFarlane’s wig is the worst.
I’d like to blame the screenplay rather than the director, but
Soderbergh was no mere hired hand. This was his project all the way. He is not
just the movie’s director, but also the cinematographer and editor. In fact, he
may well have been the screenwriter too. The credited writer, one Rebecca Blunt,
apparently does not exist and is rumored to be a pseudonym for either Julie
Asner, who happens to be the director’s wife, or Soderbergh himself!
The heist scheme itself would seem doomed to fail given the
personnel involved but is actually pretty damn clever to the extent one can
figure out just what the gang is actually doing. The problem is that despite some elaborate planning by Jimmy
Logan (the picture’s unsophisticated stand in for Danny Ocean), there is simply
no way this gang of dunderheads could pull it off, given – as we eventually
figure out – the high level of coordination and sophistication necessarily involved.
I’m all for suspension of disbelief and pretty good at it, but not to the
degree required by this movie.
On the plus side, Channing Tatum is very good as Jimmy, the
main character. He’s good looking, decent, a caring daddy and although down on
his luck, he’s got a plan. He’s not funny, but doesn’t need to be. Also good is
the precocious Farrah Mackenzie, as Jimmy’s young daughter Sadie, who lives
with Jimmy’s ex-wife but adores her daddy. And pretty Riley Keough, as Jimmy’s sister
Mellie, does a nice job of showing the smarts hidden under her somewhat slutty
exterior trappings.
But there’s so much wasted talent here. I love Daniel Craig, but although he certainly
tries hard, comedy is apparently not his thing. Watching him try to impersonate
a backwoods style explosions expert named Joe Bang (get it?), I kept thinking
it’s too bad Clooney was unavailable. The same goes for Adam Driver. His
character starts out with our sympathy because he has an artificial forearm,
having been severely injured in the Iraq war. But then the movie tries to mine
this handicap for laughs; and while deftly done this could be funny, there’s no
deftness about it. Driver reminded me in a strange way of poor, unfunny Zeppo
in the early Marx Brothers movies, except that in those the other guys were
hilarious. Jack Quaid and Brian Gleeson play Joe’s brothers, Fish Bang and Sam
Bang, as a pair of illiterate, more or less born-again idiots. Katie Holmes has
nothing at all to do as Sadie’s mom/Jimmy’s Ex. Katherine Waterston just gets
to seem nice in a small role. And the Oscar-winning Hillary Swank is pretty
much a stick in an underwritten part as a law enforcement agent.
In the film, a tv newscaster refers to the heist as Ocean's 7-Eleven. I was going to call it Ocean's Five and a Half, but that's better.
1 hour 59 minutes.
PG-13
Grade C
In Wide Release.
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