Losing the plot | 24 August 2017

Steven Soderbergh’s Logan Lucky is a heist caper that, to be fair, does what it says on the can. There is a heist. It is a caper. It also features an all-star cast and is said to be ‘the perfect summer entertainment’, which may or may not wash, depending on whether you believe the enjoyment of films is seasonally variable, or an average film is an average film, whatever the weather. It’s USP is that it’s ‘a red-necked Oceans’ or ‘a hillbilly Oceans’ so, in other words, it’s a riff on Oceans. Soderbergh directed the Ocean’s franchise, so it is hardly a stretch for him. Or us, for that matter.

Soderbergh, who can otherwise be interesting (Sex, Lies, and Videotape; Magic Mike; Behind the Candelabra), actually announced his retirement from film-making four years ago but has said that he could not resist this first-time script from Rebecca Blunt, if there is a Rebecca Blunt. (Soderbergh is fond of pseudonyms and as no trace of this Blunt can be found, some are saying that he is the writer. Soderbergh, will you come out of retirement for a script by Soderbergh? ‘Yeah. OK, then. I like his work.’) Either way, the film is set not in LA, Rome, Paris or Monte Carlo, but in West Virginia where there are no cool, glamorous guys in smart suits, just poor dumb shmucks scraping by.

Chief among them is Jimmy Logan (Channing Tatum) who, at the outset, is unfairly fired from the construction job where he worked beneath a Nascar stadium — Nascar is stock-car racing; it’s huge in America — while repairing sinkholes. However, all is not lost as he had noted something while he was down there and it’s the underground vault, as fed by the pneumatic tubes funnelling all the money taken by the vast racing complex above.