“It seems, at first, like an impossible caper,” begins Jordan Hoffman, writing for the Guardian. “Can Steven Soderbergh bring something new to the heist genre after his outstanding Oceans trilogy? The answer, as always, is to have faith in the director-producer-writer-cinematographer-editor-brandy salesman whose ingenuity has kept him one step ahead of audiences for almost 30 years.”
“A silly movie by a serious man who’s refused to become a self-important artist, Logan Lucky wants you to think of it as minor Soderbergh,” writes David Ehrlich at IndieWire. “The premise alone, so obviously a Trump country riff on Soderbergh’s biggest film that one character straight up uses the phrase ‘Ocean’s 7-11,’ is enough to position this low-key heist comedy as little more than a joy ride around a familiar track. But if Logan Lucky begs you not to take it seriously, that doesn’t mean it lacks real soul.”
“It’s a let’s-rob-the-racetrack heist comedy set in that all-American place that even rednecks would have no problem calling redneck country,” writes Variety’s Owen Gleiberman, “the land of NASCAR and child beauty pageants, spangly long fingernails and roadside biker-bar brawls, and—these days being what they are—chronic unemployment and spiritual stagnation. (Hey, nothing’s perfect.) The script, by Rebecca Blunt (it’s her first, and it’s a beauty), exploits the Southern gift for turning something as basic as a series of freeway directions into a tall tale. And Soderbergh, directing his first feature in four years (his last one was the superb HBO Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra), plays, with an invisible wink, off the natural-born comedy of mile-wide drawls that veer from the charmingly folksy into a kind of good-ol’-boy theater.”
Speaking of Behind the Candelabra (2013), at the Playlist, Drew Taylor reminds us of what Soderbergh’s been doing during his retirement ever since. For starters, “he shot, edited, and directed two entire seasons of Cinemax’s overlooked medical drama The Knick, directed an off-Broadway play called The Library, edited and shot male stripper sequel Magic Mike XXL, and released a series of weird fan edits of famous films, including Heaven’s Gate and 2001: A Space Odyssey, plus Psychos, a mirrored mash-up of both Alfred Hitchcock’s original film and Gus Van Sant’s remake.” As for Logan Lucky, Taylor gives it an A.
“The Logans of the title are West Virginia brothers Jimmy [Channing Tatum] and Clyde [Adam Driver], who have a reputation in their small town for being luckless souls who have been dealt a bad hand,” explains Screen’s Tim Grierson. “Together with their hairdresser sister Mellie (Riley Keough), they team up with incarcerated bomb expert Joe Bang [Daniel Craig] to hit a popular local NASCAR race in the midst of the event to steal the speedway’s massive cash haul.” And “despite the humor Soderbergh and his ensemble derive from these blue-collar, sometimes bumbling characters, the film’s heroes are far from backwoods caricatures, instead displaying plenty of smarts and soulfulness.”
“It’s an easy-enough game of spot-the-predecessor,” finds Nick Newman at the Film Stage: “the heist mechanics of an Ocean’s movie, the working-class struggle of a Magic Mike, and, first most riskily and then most fascinatingly, the procedural iciness of a Side Effects or Contagion. The reward is watching Soderbergh waltz with a deceptively loose style so thought-through that it’s baked into the movie’s bones.”
“Tatum brings a sweetness to his moments with his young daughter (Farrah Mackenzie),” writes Erin Oliver Whitney at ScreenCrush. “Driver is excellent as Clyde, a one-armed bartender who refuses to be pitied, swiftly pulling off his prosthetic to scare the obnoxious celebrity (Seth MacFarlane) who insults him. Keough is perfectly cast as Mellie, Katie Holmes plays Jimmy’s wine-guzzling ex-wife, Hilary Swank is great in a cameo as a determined FBI agent, and Katherine Waterston shows up for a pair of too-brief scenes as an old high school flame.”
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“As with The Knick, you can see a filmmaker trying to find the most economical and creative way to cover each scene,” writes Matt Prigge for Metro US. “He’s resourceful and imaginative, filming scenes from striking angles, using longish takes to stretch out the deadpan yuks.” Lucky Logan is “a purely auteur-driven lark slipped into an era when studios no longer want to work with directors with personality and pesky calls for final cut—a high entertainment with a handmade feel.”
“Soderbergh has made the sort of breezy, unpretentious, just-for-fun film that scarcely exists anymore, one almost anyone could enjoy,” writes the Hollywood Reporter’s Todd McCarthy.
“Good gravy, this movie is a good time,” adds Mike Ryan at Uproxx.
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