Logan Lucky

When director Steven Soderberg made the medical drama Side Effects in 2013, it was supposedly his final film. At least for a while. Sometimes he called it a retirement, sometimes just a sabbatical. But after nearly thirty years in the business, Soderberg wanted to take a break from making movies and do other things. He did some tv, produced other people’s films, took up painting. But I don’t think anyone really believed that he would stay away from big budget filmmaking forever. The director of Sex, Lies and Videotape, Traffic, Erin Brockovitch, Ocean’s Eleven and about twenty other movies is too talented and too much of a movie lover himself to ever really leave the business. 

 But I was initially surprised that Logan Lucky is the film that brought him back after a four year break. It’s the story of Jimmy Logan, a former high school football hotshot, who blew out his knee and now just gets by working construction in rural Virginia and South Carolina. He adores his beautiful little daughter and does his best to be a good dad despite his relative poverty and the distain of his ex-wife. When he loses his job and finds out his ex may be moving his daughter several hours away and he doesn’t have money to hire a lawyer to fight her, Jimmy decides it’s time to enact a plan he’s had brewing for a while.

Along with his brother and a couple of other accomplices, Jimmy plans to rob the Charlotte Motor Speedway. Channing Tatum plays Jimmy and Adam Driver plays his Iraq-veteran-turned bartender brother, Clyde. The two of them have a funny chemistry that’s heightened by Tatum’s easy-going good looks and Driver’s utterly deadpan awkwardness. They bring on demolitions expert Joe Bang played by a bleach blonde, completely committed Daniel Craig.

It’s zippy, funny, light, and unexpectedly absurd at times. What it’s not is particularly original. Soderberg himself described it as a de-glammed version of Ocean’s Eleven and that’s exactly what it is. Danny Ocean’s monologue about how the house always wins in gambling is a slick, more glamorous delivery of  how Jimmy Logan feels – the deck is stacked against a regular guy unless he does something to change his luck. So everything from the crew of misfit helpers to the carefully orchestrated heist sequence to the unexpected reveal of how the heist actually went down to the big stars in unexpected cameos to the hint at the possibility of a sequel at the end, everything is beat-for-beat almost exactly the same as Soderberg’s very successful 2001 version of Ocean’s Eleven.

So why do it? Why would such a familiar film be the thing to bring Soderberg out of his semi-retirement? Turns out, one thing he’s been thinking about for a long time is Hollywood’s marketing and distribution system and how he doesn’t like it. Soderberg doesn’t want Hollywood studios to have all the power when it comes to advertising a movie and getting it in front of audiences. So with Logan Lucky, he basically raised the money himself and struck a series of really unusual deals that gave him almost complete control over the entire process from the final edit of the film to what trailers played in which cities when. The idea, I think, was to choose a project with strong commercial appeal so that his plan would work and he could do it again in the future with perhaps more challenging or experimental material. So Logan Lucky’s familiarity was all part of the game plan for a bigger project Soderberg was taking on. Though it’s a funny, enjoyable film, it doesn’t look like it’s going to provide the game change the director hoped for. With a budget of 29 million dollars, Logan Lucky has cleared has just barely cleared 10 million worldwide so far. It seems that Logan Lucky may not be so lucky after all.