A heist needs one thing to succeed and 51 things to be great. The one thing is a fucking good heist. The other fifty are boobs. If you deliver the fifty boobs, I might forget about the heist. But if you forget the boobs, I sure as hell will notice if the heist sucks.
Hollywood makes more shitty heist movies than Budweiser makes fake craft beers. Take that mega-turd Going in Style that tore up Zach Braff’s butthole when he shat it onto screens earlier this year. Every heist movie is an opportunity for a director and writer to spin up all the gears in their heads, to make us dizzy with complexity and reversals. But that shitfest was a dimwitted, undercooked non-event.
A successful heist movie has a devious scheme as its heart. It’s got to be a God damn Rube Goldberg machine, full of twists, details and McGuffins. It’s got to look like whoever concocted it spent a shitload of time understanding the strengths and vulnerabilities of whatever it is being robbed. The obstacles the thieves have to overcome must look insurmountable. Said thieves have come up with solutions you and I wouldn’t think of, and at least solutions don’t make us go, “Oh, that’s bullshit.”
In reality, the moviemakers don’t have to know jack shit, but they have to convince us they do. That is a hell of a lot of work. They have to dream up the scenario, play devil’s advocate with every facet of the crime saying, “But what if?” They can then explain away the boring answers and play out the interesting ones. The possibilities have to be plausible enough, and fast enough, to stay one step ahead of the audience’s disbelief. Constantly distract us like you can the Harelip with a shiny coin when she’s mad.
That’s where good characters come in. And boobs. Either of those are enough to make me suspend disbelief. If the characters suck, or the mammaries are too small, I’m gonna pick apart a movie like a scab from a mosquito bite. However, if the characters are interesting enough to elicit my sympathy or ire, then I won’t pay as much attention to every last technical detail.
Director Steven Soderbergh’s Logan Lucky (he probably wrote it too, but it’s credited to a fake person named Rebecca Blunt) generally succeeds in putting a good heist on the screen, and it kind of succeeds at assigning likable characters to do it. The movie ain’t great, but at least it’s got enough meat to keep the wolves of boredom from ripping it to shreds.
Channing Tatum plays Jimmy Logan, a good old boy from West Virginia who sure does love John Denver. He’s a former high-school football star who busted up his knee and is now living in a trailer, bouncing from one shitty job to the next. His daughter competes in kiddie beauty pageants, his ex-wife (Katie Holmes) is living in nouveau riche splendor with her new hubby. His sister (Riley Keough) is a hairdresser. His brother’s (Adam Driver) a one-armed Iraq vet bartender with a temper. Yeah, they’re all a little too on the nose, too southern, but that’s how the grassfuckers in Hollywood do it. They ladle on the clichés and think that equates to authenticity. Hell, it beats having to leave their fucking mansions in LA to really understand people.
Tatum’s Logan doesn’t quite look like faded glory. He‘s a fit Hollywood actor who added a little paunch for a role. Real faded glory is soft all over, years of muscle buried under the flab of post-success failure. I would kill for that sort of body, one that suggests there were indeed glory days, no matter how long ago. What I’ve got is just failure upon failure, converted into calories limited only by poverty, and hung from a skeleton.
Jimmy has always dreamed of a heist, and he plans to go big: rob the Charlotte Speedway of all the cash spent by hillbillies during a massive NASCAR race. Think about hundreds of thousands of people buying beer, T-shirts, caps, more beer and nachos, all in cash. All that cash sits in a huge vault buried under the race track.
Jimmy recruits Joe Bang (Daniel Craig), a convict experienced enough at blowing shit up to be in prison. He also involves his sister, brother and Bang’s two lazy goons. Their heist involves a prison break, sneaking into a secure underground vault during a huge event, vacuuming out millions in cash, disguises, escaping through the crowd and returning the prisoners before anyone notices. I won’t spoil shit by saying they get away with the robbery. Of course, they do. That’s how heists movies work. The problems always come later. In this case, it’s when Jimmy gives all the money back. Or at least appears to.
Logan Lucky plays out like a night stroll. It’s pleasant and relaxing, but isn’t exciting. It’s more Lavender Hill Mob than Taking of Pellham 1, 2, 3. I found that annoying because Tatum and Craig are no Alex Guinness and Stanley Holloway. The movie needs more charm to skate on quaintness.
The plot reversals are minor. The characters are never even forced to run, just walk briskly. Their heist, as complex as it is, proceeds with nary a big glitch. On the plus side, the whole thing happens without guns. I’m not opposed to guns, but excluding them is an intentional and interesting choice by whoever the fuck Rebecca Blunt is, because guns are just so damn easy and so much the default.
There is also a leisurely half-hour of story after the robbery is over when Hillary Swank shows up as an FBI agent investigating the heist. That’s too damn much. She talks to a lot of people and asks a lot of questions, but she is hardly engaging other than I wondered how many golf balls she could fit in her mouth. It’s too little danger too late and the movie would have been better, briefer and tighter if she were aware of the robbery before it happened. Having her one step behind would have added much-needed tension.
Sadly, Seth McFarlane is also in this movie, as an arrogant racecar owner. He’s a shitty actor, and a brutally unfunny presence that draws more attention to his flop sweat than he does to actually being funny. He urinates all over his scenes like an incontinent dog.
The lovely Katherine Waterston is also in it, which made me really damn happy. She plays a nurse, one who harbored unrequited feelings for Jimmy Logan back in high school. Holy shit, she is perfect as the former wallflower who later blossomed. Her role is minor, and has a facile ending. Yet, she reminded me of so many women I wish I had treated better in high school. Who knew they wouldn’t always have braces and stringy hair and low self-esteem? The thing is, when you ignore them in high school they aren’t particularly flattered when you run into them in the grocery store today and say, “I remember you. You were ugly, but now you’re hot, so now I’m interested.”
If I had a time machine, I wouldn’t go back and try to fix things. I’d just go back and be nicer to the women who blossomed later. That way, today I’d have a lot more old classmates calling me a great guy and not a pervert.
Logan Lucky isn’t bad. It’s Three Fingers of movie, but don’t confuse it with the Lavender Hill Mob, even if its paced similarly.