Review

Logan Lucky Review: A Southern-Fried Ocean’s Eleven That Goes Down Easy

Steven Soderbergh goes in for one more caper.
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Courtesy of Claudette Barius/Fingerprint Releasing/Bleecker Street

With a lotta twang and a few twists, Steven Soderbergh returns to feature filmmaking only a few years after announcing he was done with it. He’s chosen a safe path of re-entry, doing a self-conscious tweak on his Ocean’s films in a new setting with a new star-studded cast. Logan Lucky, opening August 18, moves the action from ring-a-ding Vegas to ding-dong Appalachia: a poor town in West Virginia and a busy, bustling raceway in North Carolina. Much like Soderbergh’s offbeat, light-dark financial crisis film Magic Mike, Logan Lucky is easygoing entertainment that, on occasion, gently brushes up against its stiffer real-world framing. I’m not sure the film is as successful in doing that as Magic Mike is, but it still makes for an intriguingly toned film.

Channing Tatum and Adam Driver play heavily accented brothers bumming around their small hometown in West Virginia. Driver’s Clyde is a veteran who lost an arm during his deployment overseas, and who now runs a local bar while bemoaning his family’s famously bad luck, a curse he’s convinced will thwart whatever he and his brother attempt to do. What his brother, Jimmy (Tatum), wants to do is rob a NASCAR stadium, because his construction work is sporadic and he has an injury that keeps him from getting jobs. He’s got a daughter who lives with her mom (Katie Holmes, oddly good to see again) and he is, in some ways, trying to do right by her by robbing this race. It makes a strange kind of sense.

The heist is a complicated operation, one the brothers need help pulling off. So, much like Danny Ocean and Rusty Ryan did, they go about assembling a ragtag team. Daniel Craig plays Joe Bang, an incarcerated explosives specialist (as his name would suggest) whose temporary escape from prison is a key facet of Clyde and Jimmy’s intricate plan. (Much like in the Ocean’s movies, the plan is only revealed to us as it goes.) Jack Quaid and Brian Gleeson play Joe’s brothers, some real hick-types whom the Logans need for various heavy lifting. Most enjoyably, Riley Keough plays Jimmy and Clyde’s cool-as-a-cucumber hairstylist sister, Mellie, who stages Logan Lucky’s true heist, gliding off with the movie whenever she’s on camera.

As the film bounces and patters along, Soderbergh—working with Rebecca Blunt’s alternately agile and clumsy script—finds a groovy pitch and tempo. For the most part, Logan Lucky has a fluid, laid-back late-summer energy, which is maybe why it’s so jarring when it occasionally tries out a janky joke set-piece that doesn’t land, or features a performance that’s outsized or otherwise strained. Which does happen. The most ungainly is Seth MacFarlane, playing a British energy-drink mogul who has a sponsored a car at the race. In a movie featuring performances as natural and winning as Tatum’s and Keough’s, MacFarlane’s bad-accented shtick, all loud and cartoony, is a sore thumb. So, too, is Hilary Swank as a steely investigator who’s onto the brothers’ scheme. She’s stilted and off-rhythm, and the movie’s otherwise smooth pace halts when she’s around. It’s hard to tell if it’s miscasting or what, but it really doesn’t work.

But those are minor-ish quibbles about a mostly well-acted movie. If I take any real issue with Logan Lucky it’s the movie idea of Appalachia and the South. All that twang starts to sound a bit mocking as it goes on; the whole film takes on the shape of one big joke on poor rural Americans made by a bunch of rich Hollywood types. It doesn’t help those optics that three of its cast members (Keough, Quaid, and Katherine Waterston) are scions of wealthy celebrities, compounding the sense that Logan Lucky is punching down at a way of life that at least some members of the cast have never come close to experiencing.

But that may just be me being over-sensitive, looking for problems in a movie that is just tryin’ to have a good time. And a good time it does have, the caper proving just knotty enough to keep us guessing without losing us. (Remember Ocean’s Twelve and how utterly incomprehensible it was? This is not that.) Sure, some of the components of the plan don’t really hold up under logistical scrutiny, but whatever. It’s fun! Which is all Soderbergh is really aiming for, I think. Yes, there is some light musing on the economic state of things sprinkled throughout, and some softer grace notes that suggest deeper emotional currents. (Particularly with Jimmy and his daughter, a story line that involves a rendition of “Take Me Home, Country Roads” that is disarmingly moving.) But this isn’t the surprisingly autumnal, melancholy vibe of Magic Mike. Logan Lucky is more akin to Magic Mike XXL (not directed by Soderbergh), which hits some shaggy sad notes here and there, but is mostly meant to delight and entertain.

Soderbergh has a few more projects coming up: a feature called Unsane that was shot entirely on an iPhone, and a TV series of a sort called Mosaic, which is said to be interactive in some way. So, he’s still experimenting, tinkering around with new methods and formats, as he’s always done. Maybe Logan Lucky is as easy and familiar as it is because, well, even the most curious minds crave a little comforting sameness now and then. Which is exactly what Logan Lucky delivers, an engaging and self-aware retread of past high jinks. Nothing will surprise you, really, or challenge in any way.

Sure, there were moments while watching Logan Lucky when I found myself wishing Soderbergh would apply his considerable talents to something a bit chewier. But, as a filmmaker, he’s admirably always followed his own whims, unconcerned with genre and prestige status, and this is where his impulses have taken him for now. I suppose we should just appreciate that as it is. Logan Lucky is a little lightly fried snack between courses of Soderbergh’s strange and ever-involving feast.