'And Just Like That' Season Two: How to Watch the 'Sex and the City' Reboot Onlineīut the blokes surrounding them get double, triple crossed, emasculated by their paramours, backed into too many corners, too often, by the people they’re ostensibly supposed to outwit. Curt just got out of prison only a few days before the movie starts, after all, and has something in his possession - something valuable, we’re told - that no mere misfit could have gotten within an inch of. They are also, to be sure, experienced: far enough along in their careers as career criminals to have earned enemies, reputations, high bounties on their heads. These guys? Ronald and Curt? They’re capable, it’s true they’re no bumbling fools set up to be undone by fate, of the kind you’d find in a Coen brothers thriller, no Jerry Lundegaards. But that’s not quite the promise on which the movie delivers. No Sudden Move - with its bustling cast, period trappings, shuffling crime dialogue, canted camera angles, and warped anamorphic images designed for old-school, widescreen pleasure - feels like it should be of a part with some of those movies, but with the additional thrill of being set during an era that calls to mind old fashioned crime dramas broadly-speaking. They’re movies about people working by their wits, whose clever collaborations - seeming mirrors of Soderbergh’s own collaborations with his rotating cadre of returning writers, actors, and technicians - are as oil-slick, accomplished, and efficient as the movies Soderbergh cooks up to depict them. These are all movies in which adversity is a ruse, an invitation to play movies whose fluid, galvanizing pleasure often arises from the pure thrill of watching people pull off the impossible “against the odds,” against systems designed to appear insurmountable. But the subtle gulf between those films and the newest is that the latter are all about people who couldn’t be better at what they do - professionals who may even, as in the case of Logan Lucky, fail to look the part, in so many ways. The take has tended to be that No Sudden Move ( now streaming on HBO Max) is a return to familiar territory for Soderbergh, which is to say, satisfying territory: a crime caper with an all-star, hyper-charismatic cast à la the Oceans films, the more recent Logan Lucky, the verified classic Out of Sight. Things don’t quite work out that way - obviously. Doug Jones wants what’s in that vault and he needs one guy to keep the gun to Matt’s back as he secures it while the other two are assigned to babysitting duty, keeping watch over Matt’s family in the interim. Doug Jones (Fraser), who hired them, sets before them an easy enough mission: a guy named Matt Wertz (David Harbour) has access to a safe, at his work, that holds a secret. It’s Detroit, 1954, and Curt Goynes (Don Cheadle), recently out of prison and in need of money, finds himself paired up with a guy named Ronald Russo (del Toro), whose reputation precedes him, and some other guy named Charley ( Kieran Culkin), who no one seems to know or say much about. No Sudden Move is, to be sure, a crime drama in the classic sense, with a scheme running red-hot through its center, a straightforward-seeming if also somewhat obscure job, that ought to end in a handsome payday for some, a mission squarely accomplished for others, and maybe a casualty or two, if needed, but this isn’t the kind of plan predicated on drawing blood. Something else is up, here the characters, the scenario, it’s all a little looser, a little more haphazard, than at first appears. F or all its immediately apparent polish - and the automatic pleasure of seeing the likes of Don Cheadle, Benicio Del Toro, Brendan Fraser and others up to no good and clearly at odds - Soderbergh’s newest effort felt, for a little while, like it was reaching, wearing its coolness a bit uneasily.īut coolness isn’t the endgame, or at least, it’s not what dominates, no matter how smooth and tempered it looks, no matter how briskly stylish its music, written by David Holmes (who also wrote music for Soderbergh’s Oceans films and Out of Sight, an immediately recognizable vibe), wants to make it seem. The notion of a crime drama directed by Steven Soderbergh bears with it all manner of expectation, not unlike when you mix “gangster” with “Scorsese.” It’s all a bit 1 + 1 = 2 you can feel when the math is off, and you can also feel when the deviations are deliberate. I wasn’t sure about No Sudden Move, at first.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |