Review of Logan Lucky (2017) by Juji O — 20 Aug 2017

Hey you! Have you never been to the south? Apparently, Steven Soderburgh hasn't either. With Logan Lucky, he seems to have not only delivered a decidedly cosmopolitan parody of southern folk but somehow managed to pander to them simultaneously.

The Killing meets Ocean's Eleven meets Hee Haw all to diminishing effect in this heist comedy. It starts off strong with Channing Tatum as a down-on-his-luck blue collar worker struggling to do right by his daughter during his visitation rights.

In a less than desperate bid to remain a supportive father and ex-husband, he enlists his one-armed brother (Adam Driver) and a bank vault specialist (Daniel Craig) to rip off a NASCAR event mid race.

After you get over the giggles of hearing everyone's best southern drawl, the heist itself gets underway, and the audience's attention wanes. There are a few too many extra characters who you don't care about, some car porn, and scenes that don't seem important at first.

Of course, that's just Soderburgh falling back on his tried and true editing method of waiting until the end to show us the scenes that explained what really happened. We can feel smart for putting two and two together when we should really just feel insulted for being spoon-fed the plot after the fact.

It's not as bad as I'm making it out to be, but it's certainly not as clever as Soderburgh assumes it is. And judging by his assumption that Logan Lucky would change how movies are distributed, it looks like he should have spent more of that cleverness on making a more marketable movie than pulling a fast one on a system he's depended on for years.