Logan Lucky

It would be an easy and reductive way to start this review by observing that ‘Logan Lucky’ is the white trash B-side to Steven Soderbergh’s earlier heist movie ‘Ocean’s Eleven’.

Easy. And reductive. And not without a glimmer of truth. It would also be worth noting that ‘Logan Lucky’ enjoys the benefit of being an original piece of work rather than a remake (albeit one that surpasses its Rat Pack source material).

‘Logan Lucky’ is a film of two halves and myriad incidental pleasures. It’s not as taut or as impeccably constructed as ‘Ocean’s Eleven’, but it unfolds with the amiability of a shaggy dog story narrated by a consummate storyteller and it’s just as impressive in its casting. It is, in fact, enough of its own film that I ought to do the decent thing and knock off the ‘Ocean’s Eleven’ comparisons right here and now.

Yeah: let’s do that.

The basic set up of ‘Logan Lucky’ – though there’s a hell of a lot more going on than the merely narrative – is that Jimmy Logan (Channing Tatum), the elder scion of a family not known for having the vaguest hint of good luck shine on them, ropes siblings Clyde (Adam Driver) and Mellie (Riley Keogh) into a speedway robbery, a scheme that also compels him to recruit imprisoned safecracker Joe Bang (Daniel Craig) and his brothers Fish (Jack Quaid) and Sam (Brian Gleeson).

So why does an honest working stiff like Jimmy suddenly want to embrace a life of crime? Well, it’s partly because he’s been laid off from the very construction job that’s given him an intimate knowledge of the layout and financial workings of the speedway; partly because he’s parvenu ex-wife Bobbie-Jo (Katie Holmes) and her car-dealership-owning new husband Moody (David Denman) are about to move to another state, effectively severing Jimmy’s contact with his daughter Sadie (Farrah MacKenzie); and partly because robbing the shit out of a speedway during a NASCAR event is a big fuck you to obnoxious English racing impresario Max Chilblain (Seth MacFarlane), a wanker of the highest order who is first introduced flanked by an entourage and picking a fight with one-armed bartender Clyde. Clyde lost said arm on active service in the US army.

If that very very brief overview - one, I should add, that doesn’t even touch on Sadie’s beauty pageant obsession, Moody’s attempts to chat-up/sell a car to his sort-of sister-in-law, Jimmy’s potential romance with medical outreach worker Sylvia Harrison (Katherine Waterston), or the odd tonal shift in the last third when a heist movie suddenly becomes a police procedural – leaves you thinking that there’s more going on here than just good-ole-boys-rip-off-NASCAR, then you’re thinking as smart as … well, that’d be telling if I let on exactly whom the savviest character in the movie is.

I said earlier that ‘Logan Lucky’ is a shaggy dog story, and that’s certainly what it is first and foremost, as well as being the narrative and intellectual register in which it functions most effectively. But it’s also a study in defeated working class machismo (Jimmy was the high school quarterback destined for glory whose life actually came to nothing; Clyde went into the army in an attempt to live up to his brother’s stature and was left disabled in an explosion); the role that luck plays in how one’s life pans out (the film’s subtlest joke is the repeated denial that the Logans’ luck isn’t really cursed because Mellie’s done all right for herself: she’s a hairdresser); the social divisions created by simple earning potential (for all his business acumen, Moody is a serious trade-down for Bobbie-Jo from Jimmy); the wanton misuse of money (compare the outrageous concession stand prices at the speedway with Sylvia’s rueful commentary on how the outreach programme relies on donations); and the casually dismissive way that corporationism makes, breaks and resets the rules (the speedway management can’t determine exactly how much they lose, but sure seem happy with the insurance payout; Chilblain calls the shots over experienced drivers because his shitty energy drink pays for the race team).

I also said earlier that ‘Logan Lucky’ is a film of two halves: the first is basically a three act progression from Jimmy-gets-pushed-to-breaking-point to Jimmy-plans-the-job-and-puts-together-the-team to Jimmy-and-the-team-pull-off-the-heist, and every minute of it is an unalloyed joy; the second focuses on an FBI hardass Sarah Grayson (Hilary Swank) who tries to make sense of the case’s many weird elements and damn near puts it together. While this section is narratively valid – unlike ‘Ocean’s Eleven’, ‘Logan Lucky’ doesn’t have a Terry Benedict figure against whose oleaginous villainy even vault-cracking and multi-million theft is justified, therefore Grayson’s investigation is the mechanism by which the corporationalist shenanigans which turn victimhood into insurance-funded profit is laid bare – these scenes seem like they’ve wandered in from a different movie, and Swank’s performance seems oddly out of kilter with everyone else’s.

Steven Soderbergh’s always been something of an awkward bugger, never quite cohering to even his staunchest fans’ expectations, and it’s somehow fitting that such a luminary as Swank should emerge as the weakest link in one of his films. That said, everyone else is on form: Tatum and Driver form the best double act I’ve seen in ages (their use of “cauliflower” as a code word for Jimmy’s criminal endeavour is way funnier than it ought to be, particularly in the disgusted tone Driver uses to repeat the word, dragging it out as if it contained four times as many letters); Waterston shines in what’s basically a glorified cameo (her ‘bitch please’ look when Jimmy suggests that Sylvia is “an old lady name” is a joy to behold); Craig has more fun with a role than I’ve seen anywhere else in his filmography; and the Agitation Man of the Match Award is jointly awarded to Dwight Yoacham as a prissy prison governor beleaguered by the most hilarious prison riot ever, and Riley Keogh, who sashays through the film with insouciant cool, all haughty looks and witheringly flippant remarks.

‘Logan Lucky’ is about one degree short of a modern classic but offers so much that it’d be criminal to carp. That it shamelessly rips off ‘Two-Way Stretch’ for its most crucial subplot … aw, hell, I’m in a magnanimous mood. Full pardon granted!

The Hateful Eight

In 1967, Roy Orbison starred in his one and only film: a lightweight and gimmicky western called ‘The Fastest Guitar Alive’. It wasn’t a successful endeavour for anyone concerned. Orbison wrote a passel of bland songs for the soundtrack, only one of which – ‘There Won’t Be Many Coming Home’ – had anything specific to say. The producers, concerned that it was too serious and not in keeping with the film’s lighthearted tone, removed it. Forty-eight years later, Orbison’s civil war ballad is restored to the soundtrack of a western. A Quentin Tarantino western. And if the producers of ‘The Fastest Guitar Alive’ thought it sounded too serious in that film, it comes off as downright flippant here. Tarantino’s use of the Orbison song is the final irony in a 70mm epic that spends three hours bristling with irony, righteous anger and the kind of wallowing self-indulgence that characterises its director's approach to filmmaking.

Now, regular readers of this irregularly updated blog (I tries, folks, I really does) will know that I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Tarantino fan. I can entirely appreciate why people don’t dig his work, and completely sympathise with those whom it renders decidedly uneasy. But, because of a number of interrelating vectors, from being blown away by ‘Reservoir Dogs’ at the impressionable age of twenty, to meeting the man himself two years later when he was guest of honour at the Broadway Cinema’s Shots in the Dark festival, the trajectory of my cinephilia has progressed in tandem with Tarantino’s career. He’s the only director whose entire filmography I’ve seen on the big screen.

So, yes: I likes me some Tarantino. I even like ‘Death Proof’. And I don't edge uneasily back from his work, convinced he’s a racist because his scripts use the N-word. No racist would gift such iconic parts to black actors. What I’m not sure about, however, is his attitude to women, and nowhere have I had such doubts than with ‘The Hateful Eight’. Reader, I’m going to come straight out with it: ‘The Hateful Eight’ is the first time I’ve come out of a Quentin Tarantino film not quite sure what to make of it.

It’s been about a week since I saw the film and the more I think about it, the more I’m tempted to narrow down my rationale to one of two options:

1) Tarantino, deciding that his usual critics will accuse him of racism anyway, structures a three-hour roadshow epic in such a way that his audience will be sent stumbling into the intermission in the immediate aftermath of an almost Shakespearian soliloquy, delivered in half-mocking-half-menacing fashion by Samuel L Jackson, the (ahem) thrust of which is the phrase “big black dingus”;

2) It’s a remake of ‘Reservoir Dogs’ disguised as a remake of John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’ with Kurt Russell in the Kurt Russell role and a certain interchangeability between Jennifer Jason Leigh and Channing Tatum as regards the role of the thing.

Either way, it’s a film of two halves. The first documents the stormy stagecoach journey that brings bounty hunter John Ruth (Russell) and his shackled charge Daisy Domergue (Leigh) – the running joke about the mispronunciation of her surname is the script’s subtlest aspect – to Minnie’s Haberdashery en route to the town of Red Rock (aficionados of ‘Django Unchained’ won’t be surprised at the ‘Blazing Saddles’ homage). En route, Ruth reluctantly ends up giving a lift to fellow bounty hunter Major Marquis Warren (Jackson) and Red Rock’s sheriff-to-be Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins). Arriving at their stop, Ruth and Warren are suspicious that Minnie (Dana Gourrier) and her husband and business partner Sweet Dave (Gene Jones) are nowhere to be seen and the establishment has been left under the stewardship of taciturn Mexican Bob (Demian Bichir). Also at Minnie’s, seeking shelter from the storm, are dandy English hangman Oswaldo Mowbray (Tim Roth) – the proximity of the character’s name to notorious blackshirt Oswald Mosley cannot be coincidental – enigmatic cowboy Joe Gage (Michael Madsen) and doddery Confederate General Sandy Smithers (Bruce Dern). What follows is a series of variations on a theme, the theme being how downright fucking loathsome all of these individuals are in their own special way. Racism, snobbery, intransigence, intolerance and the deep social, political and geographical divisions created by the civil war all come to the fore. At one point, various parties suggest that the cabin itself be divided in two (I couldn’t help but think of the ‘Steptoe and Son’ episode where Albert and Harold reduce the family home to a microcosm of apartheid) as a temporary alternative to killing each other.

The second half is marked by at least two tonal shifts, the first of which is done to brilliant effect. The linear, classical storytelling of the first half goes out of the window, to be replaced with voiceover, flashbacks, shifting perspectives … basically, the whole non-linear playbook that Tarantino has delved into with zero restraint throughout his career. For approximately half an hour, ‘The Hateful Eight’ morphs into an Agatha Christie locked room mystery, with Warren in the Miss Marple role, if Miss Marple packed a pair of pistols and everyone in St Mary Mead used the word “nigger” like it was going out of style. This, for me, was easily the most focused part of the proceedings and I could happily have watched “Samuel L Jackson in a drawing room mystery with swearing and pistol whipping” for the rest of the movie; however Tarantino curtails this section with a short sharp shock of a rug pull, immediately seguing into an extended flashback that manages to be sweatily tense even though we all know, by this point, exactly how it’s going to play out.

Then we’re back to the present and the final act. Which is where the film seems to start juggling desperately – it’s a state of the nation piece; no wait, it’s an essay on how ideology deflates in the face of survivalism; no wait, it’s a variation on the theme of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”; no wait, it’s a Corbucci checklist replete with amoral cynicism and violence against women; no wait, it’s an ugly ironic statement on how liberal hand-wringing for interracial tolerance is founded on the big self-delusion of the liberal hand-wringer wanting to feel better about themself – and never fully commits to a final statement. Maybe this is what Tarantino intended. Or maybe he just decided that America – and by extension the world – is fucked and the best we can do is laugh at the sheer absurdity of it while we pointlessly kill each other.

Whichever, this is Tarantino we’re talking about and the man couldn’t do existential despair if he binged on Bergman, Tarkovsky and Tarr for a year. And that’s what gives ‘The Hateful Eight’ its wilful perversity: never mind the unpleasant places it goes, Tarantino’s sheer exhilaration in the process of film-making is splattered across every frame like a valentine’s love heart made of blood squibs.