Logan Lucky

Who wants to watch the perfumed masters of the thievery craft in a well-fitting suit today... It's a white trash world. Soderbergh is back with another genre short circuit, which is not even a little blunt, even though it looks that way at first glance. A manically constructed, deliberately subversive, economically ridiculous indie mutation of the heist genre, which perhaps loses out where one expects the biggest attraction (robbery), but it makes up for it where Ocean's Eleven was completely powerless - on a social level. You can sympathize with the Logan’s group in the most ordinary of things. When John Denver's hackneyed song sounds from the mouth of a disgustingly painted child, it's unexpectedly the best thing ever. An ode to being a loser, a film sneering at the pompous American facade, but equally sensitive to characters from the periphery... it's not a completely smooth ride, but it's something you can easily fall in love with. Steven returns dignity to the rednecks. That is not the only reason why it is good that he returned to the screen. (31/08/2017)

“They’re going to know what we want them to know.” Logan Lucky is an inventive and humorous mix of a social drama from working-class life and a heist film, a prison-escape flick and a movie about swindling, where mainly the viewer is the one being conned. There is no traditional antagonist whom the protagonists would try to outwit. It is not until the final act that the narrative is enhanced with a character who goes for the throat of the gang around Jimmy (and who is played by an actress famous enough for you to suspect that she won’t simply give up), thanks to which the film is thrilling even after the action. Soderbergh doesn’t cut directly to the chase and, in the opening part of the film, spends a relatively long time on developing the characters and fleshing out their social environment (thus the two-hour runtime makes sense), which he puts to good use in the emotionally charged climax, when I found myself alternating between emotion, amusement and (eventually) dismay in quick succession. Thanks to meaningful “backstories”, understandable motivations and a well-chosen cast, Logan Lucky, unlike other crime comedies, doesn’t lose its persuasiveness even when it asks us to sympathise with characters who sometimes say and do strange things, but for the most part, they are not one-dimensional comedic characters and their behaviour is relatively consistent throughout the film. Even charmingly bizarre, mostly unexplained moments, such as the password “cauliflower” and the taking of a bag from the “bear’, and moments that are entertaining because they are explained in too much detail (making a bomb out of gummy bears) fit flawlessly with the poetic nature of the film. As usual, Soderbergh takes extra care to ensure that nothing that happens in the film comes across as random (without motivation). As gradually becomes apparent, the film is well thought out down to the smallest detail. Soderbergh very skilfully utilises the protagonist’s favourite song, the character of his former classmate, the fact that he doesn’t own a mobile telephone and the special “salt” that Joe Bang sprinkles on his boiled eggs. The careful composition with very clever distribution of information goes hand in hand with Soderbergh’s patient direction of individual scenes. He knows exactly when to cut (and, conversely, when to stay in one place with the camera), where to place the camera so that the shot not only tells us everything important but is also funny, and how to shoot action so that we don’t lose our bearings in the given space. Logan Lucky may appear to be a mere first-class genre movie, but it offers so many premium “services” that I have no problem giving it a full five-star rating and ranking it among this year’s most satisfying cinematic experiences. 90% (31/08/2017)

I was going to give the film two stars but ended up adding a third one thanks to the second half. Once again, Channing Tatum failed to convince me that he's an actor. The only performance worth mentioning was Daniel Craig’s. I wasn't particularly enjoying the film until about halfway through, which is when things got slightly better, but I still felt like I I'd seen it all before (several times). (25/01/2018)

A nearly perfect subversive version of Ocean’s Eleven that goes about it in a different way than you'd expect. The main characters claim to be morons, and they are not very far from it, but they find themselves in a story where everybody is a moron, so they don't have to outsmart any motherfucking big boss, which nobody would buy, but only outsmart themselves and thus the viewer. Those expecting a stylized diamond robbery with an elaborate heist will be disappointed; this is "only" a cleverly constructed narrative with its own rules, where Soderbergh humorously departs from the expected patterns and enriches the main storyline with surprising twists and themes. The only problems of the brawny bunch during the heist are neither incompetent security nor electronic defence systems, but only their own stubbornness, and the experienced director surprises the viewer even in the end, when after a quickly edited passage from the heist he switches to the expected epilogue, which both reverses the previous impression of the robbers' idiocy with a classical explanation of the unrevealed events of the plot, and introduces the character of the investigator, who, despite the lack of evidence, is not about to give up and leaves the ending relatively open (and even before that, paradoxically, dismisses the only possible witness). And why did I say it’s almost perfect? Because, as much as the whole works admirably and twists expectations beautifully, I often felt an underdevelopment from the individual motifs and especially the dialogue. If more work had been done on the verbal jokes and the ending hadn't slowed down the pace so much, I would have been thrilled. (29/11/2017)

For my taste, this Soderbergh movie is too long and drawn out, lacks pace and offers only very few really funny moments. Unfortunately, I was bored most of the time, not even the stellar cast could help. Maybe if Hilary Swank had been given more space, I would have spoken differently, because it was the scenes with her that caught my attention, especially the surprisingly well-pointed one at the very end. (55%) (11/10/2022)