Logan Lucky

Little is guaranteed with Steven Soderbergh. Since he kicked off his filmmaking career 28 years ago with stylish chamber piece Sex, Lies, and Videotape, he’s taken a fascinatingly erratic path through Hollywood. Some of the films are great (Out of Sight, The Informant!), some are bad (Side Effects, The Good German), most are at least interesting.

One thing is assured, however: Soderbergh will continue to make movies, no matter how many times he tells us he’s retired. His recent self-imposed hiatus lasted just four years, around the time it takes most mortal indie filmmakers to get a production off the ground. His uninspired comeback is caper Logan Lucky, which plays like a redneck spin on the filmmaker’s earlier hit Ocean’s Eleven and its sequels. Annoyingly, this meta connection is made within the universe of Logan Lucky itself when a news anchor reporting on the robbery of one of the biggest races in Nascar dubs the low-rent operation "Ocean’s 7/11".

Jimmy Logan (Channing Tatum), the mastermind behind this grand larceny, initially seems no match for George Clooney’s wiley Danny Ocean. He’s a nice but dim divorcee with limited custody to his daughter. The film opens with him being laid off from his construction job because of his gammy leg. Later, he takes a beating in a bar fight when an obnoxious Nascar empresario (Seth MacFarlane, who’s doing the worst London accent since Don Cheadle in Ocean's Thirteen) insults his one-armed bartender brother (Adam Driver). But this loser has a plan: rip-off Charlotte Motor Speedway in an elaborate heist and in one swoop undo the fabled Logan curse that’s left him and his family on a life-long streak of bad luck.

Superficially, Logan Lucky’s madcap tone suggests a laugh riot. Most of the cast have gone to town with their Southern accents. Tatum slightly overdoes it as the hillbilly ringleader, but he looks positively restrained next to Driver and a peroxide blond Daniel Craig, who both go full Foghorn Leghorn. To accompany his cartoonish acting, Craig’s character – an explosives expert who can turn gummy bears into TNT – has a cartoon name: Joe Bang. Even Charles Dickens might raise an eyebrow at that one.

This gurning motley crew is in desperate need of some funny lines to go with their funny voices. The person responsible for the gag quota, mysterious screenwriter Rebecca Blunt, is rumoured to be Soderbergh himself working under a pseudonym. It wouldn’t be the first time this filmmaker has used an alias: cinematographer Peter Andrews, editor Mary Ann Bernard and the director are all one and the same. In this case, however, we can understand why he might keep his name off the script. Who wants to take credit for a one-laugh-an-hour comedy in which the funniest moment is Daniel Craig’s strained line reading of the word “naked”? Soderbergh’s liberal use of goofy close-ups, candy colours and zany digressions also seem to be trying to convince us that what’s on-screen is hilarious.

While the male players are a broadly sketched collection of ridiculous accents, quirky mannerisms and physical malformations, the female characters are more thinly detailed. The signature characteristic of the Logan sister (Riley Keough), for example, is that she can drive fast, but the heist involves no high-speed car chase in which she gets to shine. Katherine Waterston also plays it straight. She pops up near the start of the movie as an old flame from Jimmy’s high school days, but just as it looks like a fully-formed, interesting person might be entering the narrative to give it some substance, Waterston’s character disappears until the picture’s final scenes.

Soderbergh seems to be aiming for the kind of knockabout kookiness of the Coen Brothers’ best films (Raising Arizona, The Big Lebowski), but Logan Lucky is closer to the sneering attitude that slips into the worst of their work (Burn After Reading; O Brother, Where Art Thou?). It’s not all bad, though. As usual, Soderbergh’s cinematography is gorgeous. There’s also a surprisingly moving moment set at a Little Miss beauty pageant where a young contestant delivers a halting but deeply felt rendition of John Denver's Take Me Home, Country Roads. The song’s content may be corny, but the delivery has heart. Only the former applies to Soderbergh’s latest.