Movie Reaction: Logan Lucky

Formula: Ocean's Eleven + Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby

It impossible for me to talk about Logan Lucky without bringing up and comparing it to Ocean's Eleven. It's from the same director. It has a similar structure and style. It even makes overt Ocean's Eleven comparisons in the film ("Ocean's Seven/Eleven"). Also, on a personal note, Ocean's Eleven is one of my favorite movies ever, so good luck convincing me not to bring it up every chance I get. And, I should make it clear that none of this is a bad thing. No one is pretending that this isn't another Ocean's type movie. It's not being promised as something different. If you go into this film expecting anything other than Ocean's Eleven with southern accents, then you, my friend, are the one in the wrong.

It's also worth noting that I was rooting hard for this movie. I love Steven Soderbergh as a director, because he really does pick whatever project he thinks would be fun at the time. That's how you get something like Erin Brockovich/Traffic/Ocean's Eleven or Contagion/Haywire/MagicMike/Side Effects back-back to back. He does whatever he finds interesting at the time rather than the best opportunity for a hit with audiences or critics. Then there's the unique production of this film. Without getting too much into the details, Soderbergh made, is marketing, and is distributing this film as independently and with as little studio inference as possible. Even if the film is a bomb, it could have a significant effect on how films are produced in the future, and I'm all for that.The cast Soderbergh has assembled is great too. There's just a lot to like about this movie even before seeing it.

So, as I've already said, Logan Lucky is Ocean's Eleven with a southern twang. It takes place in West Virginia and North Carolina. Jimmy Logan (Channing Tatum) is fired from his job working construction for the Charlotte Motor Speedway due to a slight limp he has that is seen as a liability. After learning that his ex-wife and daughter might be moving away, he decides to rob the speedway using his knowledge of the money moving system there. He employs the help of his younger siblings (Adam Driver and Riley Keough) and a still incarcerated explosives expert, Joe Bang (Daniel Craig). Bang insists on including his dim-witted siblings (Brian Gleeson and Jack Quaid) and that's the crew - Logan's Six, I suppose. There's a few other big names with surprisingly meaningless roles. Katherine Waterston is a physician at a mobile clinic who shows up long enough for a meet-cute with Tatum and serves no other purpose. Hilary Swank shows up very late to investigate the speedway heist. She's sort of the Terry Benedict if he didn't show up until after the three casinos were robbed and wasn't dating the lead character's ex-wife. OK, so maybe Swank isn't the Terry Benedict at all except that she's suspicious of Tatum. Seth MacFarlane is the CEO for some energy drink company. Sebastian Stan is some driver making his comeback on the day of the race. They both could've been cut out of the movie without it making a difference. I'm not sure what to make of all the unneeded characters. Did they have larger parts that were cut or was Soderbergh purposely leaving loose ends as a weird kind of narrative red herring (i.e. just because a love interest was introduced, doesn't mean she's going to be important to the events in the story)?

Here's the thing. The plan rob the speedway is unbelievably complex. And, I don't mean that it's intricate. I mean exactly what I said: unbelievably complex. I don't believe that plan could be pulled off. The magic trick of Ocean's Eleven that makes me love it so much is that their plan, for all its intricacies, is one I believe they can pull off. The crew is made up of professionals. They explain the steps of the plan and show how the steps are pulled off. If something doesn't go right, they have back up plans ready. I won't say it is without holes, but the whole thing feels plausible. I don't believe in the plan in Logan Lucky. There's too many moving parts. Too many outsiders and outside elements to control. Just the prison break they have to pull off relies on a myriad of factors they couldn't possible be ready for such as who is getting specific prison assignments and when, the warden's reaction to the events, and how emergency response procedures will be carried out. While the film aims to be Ocean's Eleven-level clever, it ends up much closer to Now You See Me-level implausibility.

Or, maybe that's the point. Maybe it's supposed to be laughably complex. Whereas Ocean's Eleven was about slick humor that you could miss if you weren't paying attention, Logan Lucky is very broad. The only way you could miss a joke is if you left the theater to go to the bathroom when it happened. A lot of the humor can be summed up as "they talk kind of funny". So, there's definitely the argument for the movie as a meta-joke. It's Ricky Bobby as Danny Ocean. That's a bit of a lame joke though, and I don't really buy it either. There's a little too much self-satisfaction with the cleverness of the plan at the end for me to think the movie is totally in on how lame the plan is.

Probably the bigger disappoint is that I didn't care for the interplay between the characters much. Even in the lesser Ocean's sequels, I enjoyed how all the characters were defined and had history with one another. Half the time it just felt like friends trying to one-up each other with the best line in a scene. There isn't as much of that here. Tatum and Driver are earnest guys. While they may be smarter than they look, there are only occasional flashes of it, like Driver's method of getting Tatum out of a bar brawl early on. Daniel Craig is having a hell of a lot of fun as Joe Bang. It's like he channeled the "squeal like a pig" scene from Deliverance but removed all the disturbing parts of it. His brothers are supposed to be like the Malloy brothers except dim instead of always bickering. And, I guess Riley Keough's story is that she's a beautician but she's also good with cars, which I guess won Marissa Tomei an Oscar for My Cousin Vinny, so I can't knock it. I wasn't invested in any of the characters enough.

I'm definitely being too harsh on the movie so far. That will happen when it demands comparisons to one of my favorite movies. The characters are all entertaining in the moment even if they aren't memorable. Everyone is bringing their A-game. For example, I don't think anyone told Hilary Swank that she wasn't the star of the movie, and I appreciate that intensity from a minor character. There are a lot of little touches I quite liked, such as the casual physical reminders that Tatum was an all-star quarterback when he was younger. A lot of the humor is so silly that you have to laugh, even if what's happening doesn't make sense. Soderbergh, more than anyone, knows how to make this exact kind of movie, so the pacing doesn't sag and it's structured well. Perhaps its greatest sin is assuming that I was more invested in the characters and the stakes than it had earned, which is a subjective assessment anyway.

Logan Lucky is fun. It's not special. It's not a movie that will gain some cult following when people "discover it" five years from now. It's not the movie I'd expected to pull Steven Soderbergh out of "retirement"*. It is an enjoyable couple hours with a terrific cast. The film is self-aware enough that you can almost forgive its faults. I don't need there to be any sequels though. One was enough.

*Back in 2013, Soderbergh essentially said he was so disgusted with the Hollywood studio system that Side Effects would be his last theatrical film. Since then, he directed Behind the Candelabra for HBO, directed all the episodes of the Cinemax series The Knick, and produced several shows and movies. To be fair, no one actually believed this retirement claim. I don't even think Soderbergh did.

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend