Logan Lucky review – Soderbergh roars back with a riotous heist caper

It seems, at first, like an impossible caper. 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.

Channing Tatum, working with Soderbergh for the fourth time, is at his sympathetic and charismatic best in Logan Lucky. His Jimmy Logan is a divorced father, injured Iraq war vet, John Denver enthusiast and loving sibling living in Boone County, West Virginia. His wounded leg gets him fired from a construction gig at the Charlotte Motor Speedway because it’s “a pre-existing condition”.

It is another example of the Logan curse, says his brother Clyde (Adam Driver), a stoic bartender with a prosthetic hand (again, Iraq). After a humiliating experience with a Nascar-affiliated energy drink creator (Seth MacFarlane, channelling all his obnoxious energy into a boorish British accent), Jimmy pitches Clyde an elaborate plan to rob the speedway.

Logan Lucky and Ocean’s Eleven would work as a wonderful diptych, similar at times, exact opposites at others. George Clooney and his band of career criminals wore fabulous suits and hung around slick airports in the world’s greatest sunglasses. Tatum works off a checklist of vague instructions and limps around unglamorous settings in an ill-fitting Charlie Daniels Band T-shirt. A shot of Tatum eating a plastic-wrapped Drake’s Yodel is the type of grace note that elevates a minor comedy-adventure into something that somehow feels important in its specificity.

This is an exercise in shining Hollywood lights on the under-represented red states, and with it comes an unexpected degree of warmth. The Logans, who also include sister Mellie (Riley Keough), a hairdresser with a less-is-more fashion sense, don’t for a minute bring up politics or gripe about the government, but wear the weight of financial disparity with each day’s new struggles.

Screenwriter Rebecca Blunt, in her first credited work, has crafted something brimming with humour and life. The heist scenes are as satisfying to watch as an elaborate domino sculpture, but there is also ample space to make Logan Lucky one of the great hangin’-out pictures.

The Logan gang can’t pull off the caper without explosives whiz Joe Bang (Daniel Craig, with an extraordinary southern accent and a penchant for chomping on boiled eggs), but Joe won’t join in unless his two idiot brothers Sam and Fish (Brian Gleeson and Jack Quaid) are there to watch his back, and, perhaps more problematically, he’s in jail. So before they can get the loot, they’ve got to mount a prison break.

It’s all wonderfully preposterous, but also endearing and gratifying. I’d never dream of spoiling the ending, but I will say that Logan Lucky concludes with one of my favourite movie tricks, as all the characters get a curtain call. There’s almost a 30s screwball satisfaction to this rural crime story, without any of the self-referential showboating that, say, the Coen brothers would have brought to it.

Produced by Soderbergh’s new distribution company and eventually heading to Amazon’s streaming service, Logan Lucky is the perfect vehicle with which to reinstate himself as a feature director after a ballyhooed five-year sabbatical. (At first he said he’d spend that time painting, but he ended up also working as a cinematographer and producer when he wasn’t shooting two seasons of The Knick and re-editing cinema classics on his blog.)

If anyone can figure out how to pull off the biggest heist of all – getting around traditional Hollywood business models – it’s him.