Logan Lucky (2017)
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
Trying to reverse a family curse, brothers Jimmy and Clyde Logan set out to execute an elaborate robbery during the legendary Coca-Cola 600 race at the Charlotte Motor Speedway.
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46 films that influenced Logan Lucky
What critics say influenced Logan Lucky
A chicken-fried treat akin to Smokey and the Bandit and Cannonball Run , with a little Blues Brothers tossed in, the heist comedy Logan Lucky (*** out of four; rated PG-13; in theaters Thursday night) centers on a West Virginia group of accidental crooks and usual suspects who plan to plunder Charlotte Motor Speedway during a major NASCAR race.
Logan Lucky is a movie filled with so many Southern-fried yahoos, it makes the characters in Smokey and the Bandit look as cultured as those in Howards End by comparison.
It’ll never make us forget about Smokey and the Bandit, but not solely for the reason that Tatum is no Burt Reynolds.
If the “Oceans” series represented his updating of Kennedy-era Rat Pack swagger, “Logan Lucky” revives the irreverent, hell-raising outlaw vibe of “Smokey and the Bandit.”
There's Daniel Craig (aka Bond, James Bond) actually playing Joe Bang, a genius, good ol' boy safecracker in bleached blond hair and eerily reminiscent of Robert Shaw as the brilliant assassin in "From Russia With Love."
One of the many joys in Steven Soderbergh's breakneck-speed, Red-State-seeded heist comedy "Logan Lucky" has to be Daniel Craig's overt nod to 007's muscled, white-haired nemesis Red Grant, Robert Shaw's Soviet assassin from the James Bond classic "From Russia With Love."
But perhaps a better description would be that it’s a Southern-fried, larky take on Stanley Kubrick’s great 1956 racetrack robbery flick “The Killing.”
With its echoes of the three “Ocean’s” films, Martin Scorsese’s “GoodFellas,” which dramatized the 1978 Lufthansa heist at JFK Airport reaping $6 million, and even as far back as Stanley Kubrick’s race-track robbery drama “The Killing” (1956), “Logan Lucky” is a hoot.
With its echoes of the three “Ocean’s” films, Martin Scorsese’s “GoodFellas,” which dramatized the 1978 Lufthansa heist at JFK Airport reaping $6 million, and even as far back as Stanley Kubrick’s race-track robbery drama “The Killing” (1956), “Logan Lucky” is a hoot.
It has a homemade, gimcrack, screw-top quality that marks it as a pure product of the down-home Southern imagination, and the way that Soderbergh has directed the movie, rooting it in an authenticity of locale, manners, and economics, it could almost pass for a true-life crime drama, like the Lufthansa heist in “GoodFellas” (even though this one is all made up).
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What ensues is a playful, down-home take on “Ocean’s Eleven” that relies less on sleek gadgetry and sophisticated repartee than on cramped ductwork, pneumatic tubes and dim-witted, aw-shucks patois.
And now, he’s back on the bigger screen with Logan Lucky, a light, twangy Southern fried caper flick that’s just a hoot and a holler away from a full-on Ocean’s Eleven parody/apology/homage.
Something of a companion piece to Soderbergh's "Ocean's Eleven" but an antithesis of the shiny, high profile glam of that offering, "Logan Lucky" ends up on my list of favorite crime caper heist flicks and thus rates as a 7 out of 10.
El escritor, director y productor americano es responsable de darnos estupendos filmes como la trilogía de “Ocean’s Eleven”, “Traffic”, “Erin Brokovich”, “Magic Mike” y “Contagion”.
Working a script by rookie Rebecca Blunt, Soderbergh approaches Logan Lucky as a knucklehead version of his Ocean’s Eleven Vegas romps; the raceway caper is actually referred to within the movie as “Ocean’s 7-Eleven.”
That explains why Soderbergh, who directed “ Ocean’s Eleven ” (2001) and its two sequels, begins the latest movie with so sweaty a statement of intent: Channing Tatum, busy with his tools, under the hood of a truck.
En esta ocasión esa trama es filtrada a través de un sentido del humor que se ha visto en pantalla en las mejores comedias de los hermanos Coen (“Raising Arizona”, “Fargo”, “Oh Brother Where Art Thou?”) Como cineasta Soderbergh es demasiado metódico y obsesivo para dejar que los elementos más ridículos de su película empujen a sus personajes hacia la caricatura.
The characters' Southern drawl recalls some of the Coen brothers' funniest films ( Raising Arizona, O Brother, Where Art Thou? , etc.), and their criminal cleverness is reminiscent of some of Quentin Tarantino's work.
Soderbergh seems to be aiming for the kind of knockabout kookiness of the Coen Brothers’ best films (Raising Arizona, The Big Lebowski), but Logan Lucky is closer to the sneering attitude that slips into the worst of their work (Burn After Reading; O Brother, Where Art Thou?).
And the deadpan Driver stands out in the cast, sort of a cracker caricature of Nicolas Cage’s hero in “Raising Arizona.”
He knows how to get at a $14 million NASCAR cash trove after a giant sinkhole opens beneath Charlotte's racetrack (which actually happened in 2010; the racetrack joked that in fixing it, they found Burt Reynolds' toupee from Stroker Ace, shot there).
The late, great Robert Altman was known for such putative toss-offs (think California Split or The Long Goodbye) that play like a party yet still linger in the memory.
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In fact, “Logan Lucky” reminded me most of Howard Hawks’ “El Dorado,” in which the director basically just re-made his immortal “Rio Bravo” a few years later because it was a good story he felt like telling again.
The late, great Robert Altman was known for such putative toss-offs (think California Split or The Long Goodbye) that play like a party yet still linger in the memory.