Green Goblin Reviews: Logan Lucky
Let me make this perfectly clear before I go forward. I am not a professional film critic. I don’t get paid to do this; it’s more of a weekend hobby. I didn’t study filmmaking in college and a lot of my knowledge of how motion pictures are crafted comes second-hand from actual film geeks around me both in real life and on Youtube. The closest I have to any kind of film education would be my high school TV production class, where I helped our school’s news program (which lasted all of 3 episodes) and watched Citizen Kane one time. I’m putting all this out front and center so that when I tell you that prior to this film’s production I had no honest clue who Steven Soderbergh was, it’s a little more understandable. Yes, sad to say that apart from Pleasantville (which he only produced), I’ve never actually sat down and watched any of his films prior to Logan Lucky. That means I haven’t seen any of the Oceans movies or Magic Mike or Sex, Lies and Videotape. And honestly, I find myself a little baffled about it. I can go on for ages about Raimi, Spielberg, Cameron, Zemeckis, Whedon, Hitchcock, Sorkin, Kubrick, King, Craven, Lee, Rodriguez or Tarentino, but Soderbergh was just never on my radar. I guess we all have blindspots, but I aim to rectify this particular one as soon as possible, because I loved the hell out of this film.
The movie focuses around a divorced, construction worker named Jimmy Logan (Channing Tatum) who we see get fired due to liability from a preexisting condition that he never divulged (blown-out knee from high school football). With his new lack of income and his ex-wife (Katie Holmes) moving out of state with his daughter, Jimmy comes up with a plan to rob the Charlotte Motor Speedway of all of its concession earnings during its big race day. To do so, he recruits his kid brother Clyde (Adam Driver), his sister Mellie (Riley Keough), a still-incarcerated former bank robber named Joe Bang (Daniel Craig) and his two hillbilly brothers in order to enact what is essentially a heist plan, constructed by the gang from King of the Hill (the Mike Judge one) through the lens of Napoleon Dynamite.
To go into any further detail would spoil some of the fantastic setup and intricacy of the overall plan and like all heist films, it’s best to experience this fresh. As this is very similar to Soderbergh’s “Oceans” films (I’m told), he’s clearly an expert at setting these situations up. There are other minor subplots in the film, but he wisely chooses to keep them miniscule and in the background. For example, Jimmy also has to see his daughter perform at a beauty pageant the same day as the heist. Does something monumentally tragic happen if he fails? Not really. He just also wants to be a good father when he’s not doing the job. Clyde believes that with Jimmy’s blown-out knee and his own amputated arm from his military service that there is a curse on his family name. Does his pessimism get in the way of the job? Does he have to overcome some mental hurdle and just embrace whatever luck comes his way? Not really, but it does lend itself to some funny situations when he shares the screen with proactive Joe Bang, or when a fight breaks out at the bar that he serves drinks out of. The characters are all pretty well fleshed-out human beings with needs and motivations and they play off of each other wonderfully, but the heist is still front and center for the vast majority of this film and rightfully so. Everything else is just intricate garnish to a very hearty main course.
The humor is somewhat mild through most of this film, with a few legitimate knee-slapping lines sprinkled in (one particular joke involving Game of Thrones spoilers had my entire theater laughing their asses off). They manage to balance the tension and jokes in this film pretty damn well. Just when you’re on the edge of your seat thinking the whole plan is about to blow up, a well-placed cutaway or sight gag manages to give you a sensible chuckle and bring you back down, all the way to the climax. But just like with most good heist films, you’ll come back to watch it all come to fruition like a complicated game of Mouse Trap.
Typically, August is where a lot of studios dump their dud films that they think won’t be able to pull in a lot of money. It’s not quite Oscar season yet, and the blockbusters are coming to a close, so this is where movies come to die, basically. Thankfully, with the wonderful Atomic Blonde and now this, we can hopefully see a bit of a change in how films get released. I like being pleasantly surprised and I’d like it to happen more often.
9/10 There’s really nothing else out as good as this. Check it out before your friends do, so you can say you were on the bandwagon before it was cool. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go rent the Oceans films and binge on them for a while.