Red State Blue Collar Crime
or
"Wahl, Tha's the Problem! Ah Put Too Many Twists in the Bag!"
When you're sitting through Logan Lucky, the latest return from retirement of director Steve Soderbergh,* you're thinking "This isn't very good." It's not as funny as it could be while you're sitting through it. There's just something a little ugly veering through it. It's like a heist version of "Dukes of Hazzard," where everybody's just a little "slow" or addled. You're not sure who's side it's on—is it making fun of its blue-collar protagonists or just "being satirical." You begin to feel for the conspirators that not only are they going up against "the system," but also have the film-makers making them look like fools.
Jimmy Logan (Channing Tatum) is a divorced father—divorced from Bobbie Jo (Katie Holmes), father of Sadie (Farrah Mackenzie)—working on his truck and explaining to her the story behind his favorite song, John Denver's "Take Me Home, Country Roads" ("Almost heaven, West Virginia"...the original lyrics were "Almost heaven, Massachusetts") about his home-state. She's looking for a song to sing in the talent portion of her adolescent beauty pageant. Thanks, but she'll sing Rihanna's "Umbrella," instead. Well, okay, so he drives her back to the ex's—she's married a car salesman, Moody (David Denman) who has two kids, and goes to work where he's working construction for the tunnels running underneath the Charlotte Motor Speedway. But, at the end of his shift, he's laid off—the insurance company for the construction company has noticed his limp—an old football injury that ended his promising career as a football quarterback.
He goes to the Duck Tape bar, run by his brother Clyde (Adam Driver), who has lost an arm in Iraq and now has a fairly useless prosthetic—it doesn't stop him from creating a meticulous drink one-handed for a British entrepreneur (Seth McFarlane), who's a bit of a dick, picking a fight with Jimmy and delaying the idea that's formulating in his head that he wants to tell Clyde—he wants to go back to their days when they were kids and rob something. But, something big.
Clyde knows there's no way to talk Jimmy out of his idea—they're both down on their luck, so he throws in, especially after taunting Clyde with his "dare" code-word: "Cauliflower." The two decide that they will need help from the best safe-cracker they know—only he's still in prison. That would be Joe Bang (some guy named Daniel Craig) who, although he's glad to see the Logan Brothers thought enough of him to visit, still think they are crazy if they think they're going to recruit him for a job. He is, after all, "in-car-cer-rate-ted," and won't released for five months and Jimmy's timetable has the robbery happening in...what, five weeks?
People must be right: those Logan boys are crazy. ("Who says that?")
But, they're undeterred. They need Joe Bang, so they decide they'll expand the project: they'll figure out what they need to do to get the cash, then spring Joe Bang from prison, carry out the robbery, then put Joe Bang back into prison without anybody suspecting that he left in the first place. Some plan. But Joe is skeptical.
But not skeptical enough not to suggest that when the Logan's are doing their reconnaissance that they get some aid from his brothers, Fish (Jack Quaid, son of Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan) and Sam (Brian Gleeson, son of Brendan and brother of Domhnall) to do some leg-work. Although professing to have turned over new leafs and turned away from criminal activities, the brothers decide they will help the Logans this one time. With the driving aid of Logan sister Mellie (Riley Keogh, granddaughter of Elvis, the Elvis), they cement their plans and wait for the inevitable occurrence that makes all their planning go awry so that they have to punt in order to carry it off.
This is, after all, a "heist" film, something Soderbergh is familiar with, having previously directed Ocean's 11, 12, and 13. It's a format and genre with which he's comfortable and it offers a director a great deal of flexibility, especially if the target is a real location (and they can go into "documentary mode" which is attractive to Soderbergh). The elaborate "job" is the constant with all of its intricacies intact; everything else is up for grabs, interpretation, ad-libing and improvisation. As long as the skeleton of the caper is in place, everybody can flesh it out as they see fit.
The difference here is location, location, location. Even though the "Ocean" movies belong to the same genre, the same "type" of film, they couldn't be less similar. The differences are literally night and day—Logan Lucky is not a bunch of cynical smart-asses trying to trump each other in the twilight of the morally arid desert of Las Vegas, where the only thing natural is the celery in a Bloody Mary. The setting here is rural in the daylight, without the hint of glitz but only the aspiration of bling, and although the root of all enterprise is the money gained from the vice of gambling, it is not bathed in neon but motor-oil, the greed tempered with the sense of accomplishment, the inspiration centered around family values, which are seen as surpassing any monetary equivalent.**
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| "WE are DEALING with SCIENCE here" | | | | |
Unlike the Ocean's, the plot doesn't involve anything like hacking ("I know all the twitters" says the one computer "expert" of the group), or any real technology of any intricacy (and the only "bugs" used in the plot are cockroaches—real cockroaches). This is a low-dig' crime depending on being able to tap into the technology of the track's own "money highway"—the Logan gang just provide an extra off-ramp for their convenience and enrichment.
The other thing different is that the circumstances reach an epiphany of sorts— something the other heist movies of Soderbergh's never achieve—that changes motivation and resolution, eventually creating a situation where it almost becomes a victimless crime for all the principles, ending in acts of charity that only enhance its theme of family. At the heart of it is not greed or revenge—leave that to the 1 percenters—but a conviction that if it's going to count, make it count for something.
* How many times is this—the second or third? I've lost count, but it doesn't really matter. Soderbergh will never really retire, as he has film running through his blood like red corpuscles. He's a natural film-maker. But, being a good film-maker is only part of the job if you're doing things through Hollywood. Soderbergh has always had the indie spirit, writing films, shooting films, editing films, even if they're not his own. But, in Hollywood, making movies is two jobs—the making and the financing. Soderbergh hates the capricious winds of Hollywood and seeing the next two years' work evaporate because a studio-head is having a bad day. So, he's always been looking for the new business model: self-financing, releasing through theaters and the internet simultaneously, his own production company—first with George Clooney and then by himself, television sales, and Logan Lucky's model—self-financed with a skeleton crew and with the financial help of states' funding and one big beneficiary-NASCAR, utilizing a new releasing company, Fingerprint Releasing, founded by Soderbergh. The end-titles say "Nobody was robbed during the making of this film. Except you."
** I would suggest that "family values" was at the root of some of the casting, too, from the casting from so many branches of sow-buisness families, but Soderbergh did that in the Ocean films with lesser-names of the big name families of Caan and Affleck.
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