Logan Lucky; Soderbergh is back, baby

Logan Lucky is one of the most straightforwardly enjoyable movies I’ve seen all year. Soderbergh went to unheard of lengths to keep all the control of the movie to himself, selling off just about every right other than the profit from cinema screenings so as to keep the final cut. That’s how far you to have to go now to make a movie that looks just like the kind of movie they don’t make any more, a simple caper movie of the sort that got churned out every week when I was a kid.

Of course, it was never that easy to make a good caper movie. Most of them have too much caper and not enough to care about. Logan Lucky works because Soderbergh got himself a talented cast. Channing Tatum once again took me by surprise with Logan himself, a guy who looks far too dumb to plan anything much beyond Netflix and Chill, but turns out to be a patient canny plotter who faithfully follows every step of his ten step plan. And unlike Chris Pine’s bank robber from Hell and High Water, Logan’s likeable all the way through and has a plan where no-one really loses, except for the diffuse cloud of people whose insurance premiums went up a little after the Motor Speedway claimed back their losses.

It’s a cheerfully ramshackle plot, and Logan’s sad sack brother painstakingly explains how unlucky the entire Logan family has been for generations, so most half-awake viewers will sit there waiting for everything to go calamitously wrong. The first hint that it won’t go that way is that the plan is never really explained. The first law of caper is that if you hear the plan, it will fail. If you don’t hear the plan, it will probably go fine. That’s just good story telling, which is about trying to surprise the viewer. If you get told the plan, there’s no surprise when things unfold according to it. 

Once things do unfold, it’s all very satisfying. All kinds of apparent mis-steps turn out to have been very clever misdirection. And nothing goes to waste; every single little nagging worry is sorted out before the credits.

Except for one. In a shout out to the ending of Ocean’s 11, Hilary Swank’s FBI agent shows up at the last moment, just as everyone thinks they’ve got away with it. I really hope there isn’t going to be some kind of Ocean’s 12 to wreck all the good will from this one.