Lucky Steven

When 50-year-old Steven Soderbergh announced his retirement from film in 2013, most people scoffed. The notion that a talent as restless and curious as Soderbergh was ready to hang up his jodhpurs and join the shuffleboard set seemed ridiculous. As it turned out, Soderbergh was hardly a bingo-night regular during his four-year sabbatical—he directed twenty episodes of The Knick, helped Spike Jonze with Her, posted striking re-edits of movie classics on his website, served as cinematographer on Magic Mike XL and produced three other series, including an adaptation of his own The Girlfriend Experience.

Soderbergh did more (and better) work in his retirement than most people do during their entire careers, and now he returns to feature filmmaking with Logan Lucky, which is like last year’s Hell or High Water rebooted as a gregarious heist movie. Logan Lucky stars Channing Tatum and Adam Driver as likeable ne’er-do-well brothers who rob Charlotte Motor Speedway to pay their bills. The screenplay is credited to Rebecca Blunt, who was recently revealed to be fictitious, and some think Blunt might really be Soderbergh (he already serves as his own director of photography under the pseudonym Peter Andrews).

Logan Lucky is one of Soderbergh’s deceptively lightweight genre excursions, and he borrows elements from previous works ranging from the Ocean’s trilogy to Magic Mike to Out of Sight. Soderbergh often struggles to find a balance between following his clinical inclinations and fulfilling commercial expectations, but Logan Lucky hits a sweet spot. Tatum gives a sturdy star performance as Jimmy Logan, an unemployed West Virginia construction worker and struggling single father, while Driver plays Jimmy’s one-armed brother Clyde and Riley Keough slings attitude as their gearhead sister Mellie.

When Jimmy gets fired from his job at the Speedway, he ropes Clyde and Mellie into a plan to rob the stadium’s vault. Due to the construction around the stadium, the vault’s seismic sensors will be disabled, meaning the would-be robbers just need to break in and blow up the safe. Unfortunately, the only explosions expert they know is a bottle-blonde pyro named Joe Bang (Daniel Craig, getting a rare chance to cut up), who is currently incarcerated. More complications come from Jimmy’s blonde moppet daughter, and from a fatuous race car promoter unrecognizably played by Seth MacFarlane.

As with any halfway decent heist film, the fun comes from watching the characters create and execute a seemingly impossible plan, with all the setbacks, double crosses and audience misdirects that entails. In that respect, Logan Lucky is a roaring success, endlessly entertaining as a process movie without sacrificing any of its good-natured swagger. But the film is also overstuffed with broad character turns seemingly borrowed from a Coen Brothers reject pile (Dwight Yoakam is a marvelous exception as a stubborn prison warden), and while amusing in the moment, it feels a little flimsy in retrospect.

Logan Lucky is certainly a sharp-looking vehicle, even if there’s not much going on under the hood.