Review of Logan Lucky (2017) by Thewaffle — 05 Sep 2017

A fun premise, but the film rarely takes full advantage of it. A roadside bar in West Virginia seems like a good place to find some interesting characters, but we never get to see any. A Nascar race seems like a perfect location for some fun heist hijinks, but instead we just get some cashiers and a few security guards.

The main character's motivation is pretty weak: laid off for some uninteresting reason, not really struggling for money (his daughter seems well cared for), and he's not motivated by revenge. We meet a few characters that seem to hold promise, but they ultimately disappoint, and the film decides that there's just going to be one scene where we bring out everyone's quirks, then those quirks are absent from the rest of the film.

A cursed high school quarterback, an Iraq War vet, two morally dubious religious converts, and an eccentric bomber sounds like a great setup with plenty of ways they could play against one another. But few of the fun scenes that you'd imagine ever materialize, and the long/uninspired editing doesn't do the film any favors.

The film also has an awkwardly long epilogue, which is one of the few times that I've thought that a montage would have improved a film (rather than awkwardly lingering on characters for 20 unneeded minutes).

There are a few genuinely good laughs and the heist is solid, but this ultimately feels like a film that needed a few more drafts of the script and a much more quirky editor.