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!

Haywire

I’d had it on good authority that ‘Haywire’ was one of two things: an attempt (director Steven Soderbergh re-teaming with screenwriter Lem Dobbs) to recapture the reconstructive brilliance of ‘The Limey’ but here drawing on the tropes of the espionage thriller; or Soderbergh basically taking the piss with a decent chunk of studio money. And, on various levels, ‘Haywire’ is both of these things. More besides? Let’s amble through the next few paragraphs, then come back to that one.

Comparison with ‘The Limey’ will forever be the elephant in the room for ‘Haywire’, the phrase “suffering by comparison” never more true than here. ‘The Limey’ has the cleverer script and the artier direction, not to mention a more genuinely emotional hook and a powerhouse central performance, Soderbergh proving himself the first director in a couple of decades capable to giving Terence Stamp something cool and edgy and iconic to do. ‘Haywire’ on the other hand is built around Gina Carano and while there is much to be said in her favour, she ain’t no Terence Stamp and Dobbs doesn’t give her even a fraction of the salty dialogue that the earlier script is seasoned with. True, ‘Haywire’ is packed full of talented actors in subsidiary roles – Michael Fassbender, Ewan MacGregor, Bill Paxton, Antonio Banderas, Michael Douglas (hell, even Channing Tatum manages not to be a sop-ass pretty-boy in this one!) – but talented actors in subsidiary roles is all they are. Which is part of the joke.

Carano had made tentative forays before the camera – the documentary series ‘Fight Girls’, a bit part in ‘Blood and Bone’ – but ‘Haywire’ represents her first lead role and the responsibility which goes with it: that of carrying a movie. And in this respect, surrounding a nascent talent with established performers – generally done with the aim of “buoying up” the lead performance – can often be the kiss of death. Soderbergh is wise enough to pitch the entire timbre of the film to Carano’s strengths. A reductive critic would probably add “i.e. looking good and kicking ass” parenthetically at this point, but Carano definitely has a presence and a certain degree of charisma onscreen. Although she’s admitted that Soderbergh manipulated some of her dialogue in post-production, there’s enough going on in ‘Haywire’ to suggest Carano could carve herself a deserved niche as an action heroine. 

Story-wise, what we have is some fairly generic characters – The CIA-Trained Operative Gone Renegade, The Handler, The Shady Politician Outsourcing To Private Operatives, The Latino Connection With His Own Agenda – playing out a fairly generic game of Second Guess The Next Double-Cross, the needlessly convoluted intricacies of which are glued together by a succession of fight scenes and chases, either vehicular or on foot. Soderbergh, it has to be said, shoots the action like a man determined to show up Michael Bay as a big phoney and never mind that he’s only got a micro-fraction of a Bay-style budget. The action is the primary reason for watching ‘Haywire’ and the film delivers.

It delivers while simultaneously being a knowing homage to its genre. I’m tempted to say satire rather than homage, but satire implies if not outright parody then at least a comedic overtone to the aesthetic. And ‘Haywire’ certainly isn’t a laugh-out-loud funny movie. It’s not meant to be. Although the last scene is almost guaranteed to prompt a wry smile. What ‘Haywire’ is, is a supremely intelligent director employing a playful approach to material that’s been done ad nauseum and abandoning innovation on a narrative or conceptual level in order to indulge himself in a sleight-of-hand display of technique.

Which brings us back to that first paragraph question. Is there anything more to ‘Haywire’? My personal feeling is yes: the sheer pleasure of watching Soderbergh indulge himself as described above. He has fun reducing McGregor, Douglas and Banderas’s dialogue to little more than jargon-heavy white noise: spy-speak overlayered with corporate vagary; and he has fun with structure and set-pieces. The main narrative of Carano’s character, Mallory, hightailing it across the USA in flight from (and later pursuit of) her betrayers is intercut with flashbacks to two missions – one in Barcelona, one in Dublin – which directly relate to her current predicament. Soderbergh stages the Barcelona job as a masterclass in dialogue-free exposition, and the Dublin escapade as an effortlessly effected segue from seductive Bondian elegance to Bourne-style smackdowns and rooftop chases.

‘Haywire’ is, in other words, extremely entertaining – and put together with a lot more élan than a film of this ilk would normally boast. And its leading lady is a knockout – in both senses of the word.

The Limey

I know I've disparaged the whole 'Movie-X'-meets-'Movie-Y'-as-an-easy-way-of-pigeonholing-'Movie-Z' school of film criticism in these pages before (and rightly so: it's a lazy and unimaginative way of writing), but in the case of 'The Limey' there's no other way of putting it:

'The Limey' is 'Get Carter' meets 'Last Year at Marienbad'.

Feel free to stop reading at this point, pour a large glass of scotch, maybe re-watch Mike Hodges' amoral revenge-thriller classic and Alain Resnais' oblique arthouse puzzler back-to-back, and then ponder long and hard on the implications of that comparison.

I'll say it again: 'The Limey' is 'Get Carter' meets 'Last Year at Marienbad'.

Director Steven Soderbergh takes a fairly humdrum premise - British career criminal goes to America to find out the truth behind the death of his daughter and gets medieval on the collective asses of anyone and everyone who was either involved or stands in his way - and turns it into an avante-garde experiment in editing, narrative dissonance and aesthetic abstraction.

At this point I need to give myself a bollocking for using the phrase "aesthetic abstraction" because it exemplifies the kind of wanky analytical film writing I started The Agitation of the Mind to get away from. But again, I'm screwed if I can find another way of putting it. 'The Limey' is a genre movie put on the psychiatrist's couch, encouraged to indulge its more violent and antisocial tendencies as part of its therapy, then reconstructed as a divisive, discursive and challenging art movie.

What defines 'The Limey' is its editing. How many movies do you remember principally for the way they're edited? The work of Godard. The aforementioned 'Last Year at Marienbad'. That's about it. Of course, there are movies aplenty which demonstrate effective use of editing - take virtually any summer tentpole action movie: a fight scene, chase or shoot out is only as good as the editing. A sloppily edited shoot out will have no spatial continuity and leave you thinking that bullets are whanging about all over the place and the combatants sheltering in entirely different locations. An uninterestingly edited car chase will simply reduce speed, tension and white knuckle stunt driving to interminable shots of one car following another car. But the most memorable fights and shoot outs and car chases are edited to emphasise the fighting or the shooting or the chasing - seldom does the editing call attention to itself.

Except in the case of 'The Limey', which might as well open with the credit "a film edited by..."*. This is editing which not just calls attention to itself, but happily demolishes the linear and the logical (several dialogue scenes feature non-speaking participants). It goes beyond montage, juxtaposition, flashbacks or flashforwards. It's more like a cardsharp shuffling the very movie, dealing out scenes and images and iconography, sweeping them up from the table again and cutting them back into the pack. It's a frustrating or utterly joyous viewing experiencing depending on your mood, your genre expectations and whether you might have consumed proscribed substances prior to watching.

The 'Get Carter' comparison is apposite: Michael Caine's eponymous tough guy and Terence Stamp's career criminal Wilson both hail from London; Carter arrives in Newcastle a fish out of water and needs help from one of the locals to find his way around, Wilson touches down in L.A. and relies on his contact Ed Roef (Luis Guzman)'s help to assess the lie of the land; Carter's after the truth behind his brother's death, Wilson his daughter's. Both rampage from one encounter to the next in bull/china shop stylee.

Wilson's trail leads him to record producer Terry Valentine (Peter Fonda). A fellow '60s icon, Fonda is an ideal counterweight to Stamp's stentorian intensity. Their respective backgrounds set up a sneaky little subtext - East End vs East Coast - to the culture clash scenario writ so large elsewhere in the film. "There's one thing I don't understand," declares a gang boss cop (Bill Duke) who's just sat perplexedly through a colloquialism-laden rant by Wilson, "and that's every fuckin' word you say." At times Wilson's lexicon of 'Sweeney'-isms (example: "Now look, squire, you're the guv'nor round 'ere, I can see that. I'm in your manor now, so there's no need to get your knickers in a twist. Whatever this bollocks is that's going down between you and that slag Valentine's got nothing to do with me") tips into pastiche, particularly when Stamp cuts loose and lays on the ham.

And yet it works. It works because the great Luis Guzman is such a laconic foil to Stamp. It works because the film looks so good. It works because Soderbergh assembles a kick-ass '60s soundtrack (any film that kicks off with a blast of The Who automatically wins points with me).

And it works for exactly the reason it shouldn't. It constantly reminds you that you're just watching a movie. The very nature of the editing is a statement of self-reflexive intent. That Soderbergh cuts in footage of Stamp in Ken Loach's 'Poor Cow' by way of flashbacks takes it further and reminds you that you're not just watching a movie but that the guy in the lead role is an actor who's been in other movies. This would normally be the point at which my interest would be killed stone dead, a priest summoned and the last rites performed.

And yet it works. Even though it shouldn't. And that in itself is part of the pleasure.



*For the record 'The Limey' was edited by Sarah Flack, one of her three collaborations thus far with Soderbergh.

Che - Part Two

‘Che – Part Two’ is at the same time more immediate and less satisfying that its predecessor.

More immediate because it’s free of the self-consciously arty black-and-white New York City sequences that interrupt the flow of part one; because the pursuit of Guevara and his small band of Bolivian freedom fighters by a remorseless military gives the film a constant senses of movement, as well as imbuing every frame with threat and tension.

Less satisfying for mostly the same reasons.

As with the first film, it’s not a biopic – it’s a treatise on the logistics of organising a revolution. As such, it feels very much like a variation on a theme. The main differences are geographical (Bolivia instead of Cuba) and historical (the ’60s, not the ’50s; Guevara is an older man) – but the principal different is the outcome.

The Cuban revolution was successful. Guevara’s Bolivian campaign was a failure.

Abandoning the political stage, a heavily disguised Guevara (Benicio del Toro in even more impressive form than part one) fetches up in Bolivia. With no supplies and with none of the manpower he had as Castro’s right hand man, he attempts to transform a painfully small and disorganised group into guerrilla fighters. Everything is against him: his health worsens (the asthma attacks he suffered before have become more severe, more debilitating); his men are undisciplined and infighting abounds; food is hard to come by; the peasants they are fighting to protect betray them under bribery and threats from the Bolivian army; American involvement exacerbates things.

The two films are yin and yang. Opposites but mirror images. Part one is the rise of Che Guevara. Part two is his fall. Part one is about the planning and coming together of a revolution. Part two is about disintegration. Part one ends in triumph, part two in failure.

Part one works as a stand-alone film. Part two doesn’t. It needs the events of the first instalment for context, otherwise it would be too fragmentary, too downbeat; the sucker punch of the ending wouldn’t resonate half as effectively.

When I wrote about ‘Che – Part One’, I was disappointed that I hadn’t had the opportunity to see the four and half hour roadshow version. I’m glad now that that was the case. The similarities would have been too pronounced.

So would the differences.

Che - Part One

Q. When is a biopic not a biopic?

A. When it’s Steven Soderbergh’s ‘Che – Part One’.

But before I get into the whole biopic discussion, some thoughts on the title. Early word, when Soderbergh premiered the film(s) at Cannes, was that he’d made two stand-alone but thematically connected films (shot in different aspect ratios) entitled ‘The Argentine’ and ‘Guerilla’. Then I heard that a limited American release offered film-goers the opportunity to experience the whole thing in a single four-and-a-half-hour sitting – a “roadshow” edition called ‘Che: A Revolutionary Life’. Now it shows up in the UK as ‘Che – Part One’ and, opening next month, ‘Che – Part Two’ – which, according to some of the American film sites I follow, are the titles of the two halves of the “roadshow” version.

So why, particularly when they’re being released a month apart, aren’t the UK showings going under the titles ‘The Argentine’ and ‘Guerilla’? With different aspect ratios, and occupying different timelines and geographies (the Cuban revolution of 1958-59 in the former; the failed Bolivian revolution of 1967 in the latter), it’s clearly only a film of two halves if seen in the “roadshow” format, nor does it seem quite as simple as saying one film is the sequel to the other.

But enough! Two paragraphs and 200 words on the title alone!?!

To business: ‘Che – Part One’ is not a biopic because it tells us absolutely sod bugger all about Che Guevara the man, apart from the fact that he trained as a doctor before becoming a revolutionary (which I already knew from ‘The Motorcycle Diaries’) and he suffered from asthma. Nothing else. His background – nada. His motivations – zilch. His personal life – a single line of dialogue mentions a wife and child in Mexico; nothing beyond that.

It would be easy to say, by this definition, that the film fails. But that’s not the case. Putting aside a disjointed first 15 minutes and some intrusive voiceover (specifically during the action scenes; voiceover should not be used during action scenes), it’s an emphatic success. And it’s a success as a biopic. It’s just not a biopic of Che Guevara (a performance of gravitas and control by Benicio del Toro).

‘Che – Part One’ is a biopic of a revolution. Soderbergh’s direction, as controlled and unflashy as his leading man’s performance, concentrates on minutiae; you could almost say this is a film about logistics. Recruiting men? Make sure they bring their own rifles. Half your fighting force illiterate? Establish a school within the camp. Anyone wounded? Establish a field hospital as well. Any renegades amongst your men, taking advantage of those same oppressed peasants you’re fighting for? Use discipline – execution if necessary.

Soderbergh and his cast (good naturalistic acting here) build up a wealth of detail, keeping you entrenched in the hills and forests with Guevara’s men for much of the running time, finally taking the revolution to the streets in a superbly orchestrated and sustained set-piece at the end.

Thus the film coheres: it’s not the story of a man – it’s the story of his actions.

Posted to coincide with Steven Soderbergh’s 46th birthday. Many happy returns, sir.

PERSONAL FAVES: Ocean's 11

When Steven Soderbergh made ‘Ocean’s 11’ in 2001, he was on a roll. After nearly a decade in the wilderness following his acclaimed debut ‘sex, lies and videotape’, he’d come storming back with uber-cool Elmore Leonard adaptation ‘Out of Sight’ in 1998, followed in rapid succession by ‘The Limey’ (still criminally underrated), ‘Erin Brockovich’ (a potential courtroom yawnfest that Soderbergh somehow made compelling*) and the multi-layered Oscar-winning ‘Traffic’.

Now I love all of those films, and it can be argued (quite easily it the case of, say, ‘Traffic) that all of them have more depth, more interest, more idiosyncracies – hell, just plain more to write about – than ‘Ocean’s 11’. In fact it wouldn’t be difficult to make a case for ‘Ocean’s 11’ as an incredibly entertaining but ultimately generic remake, file it under “style over substance” and move on.

But I would pick ‘Ocean’s 11’ over its stable mates any day. Several reasons.

It’s a pitch-perfect example of pure mainstream entertainment. You don’t need to think about it too much. You can kick back with a bowl of popcorn, crack a beer, relax and let 100 minutes of cool wash effortlessly over you. There’s plenty of films that fulfil the “pure entertainment” remit – most of them, in fact – but precious few that still manage to be supremely well-made and not insult the intelligence.

It improves on the original immeasurably. Lewis Milestone’s 1960 film was a ‘Rififi’-style crime caper teaming the Rat Pack with Sixties stalwarts Angie Dickinson, Richard Conte, Cesar Romero, Akim Tamiroff and Henry Silva; a classic in the making … or would have been had Milestone been able to shoot the film he wanted.

Sinatra and co. all had big room gigs at Vegas during the shooting and this, rather than the film, became their principle focus. Then there was the partying. We’re talking about the Rat Pack, after all. In Vegas. Analogy: imagine you’ve cast Richard Burton, Oliver Reed, Peter O’Toole and Richard Harris in a movie shot around a brewery. How much usable footage do you think you’d get in the car each day of shooting?

Between his stars not turning up on set, and throwing out the script in favour of jokey ad-libbing when they did, the first ‘Ocean’s 11’ lost its chance at greatness. It’s still good fun, but a shroud of “what if” hangs over it.

Soderbergh, however, didn’t have such problems. The script for his version – by Ted Griffin – was tight as a snare drum (the reason there are no deleted scenes on the DVD is that everything slid together so perfectly: nothing about the script was redundant) and zinged with cool dialogue. The cast is top-notch: George Clooney**, Brad Pitt, Andy Garcia (doing his best work in ages), Elliott Gould (ditto), Carl Reiner and Julia Roberts (the “introducing Julia Roberts” credit at the end is priceless). The second tier shine: Bernie Mac, Casey Affleck, Scott Caan and Eddie Jemison hold their own against the big names.

Music, cinematography, production design, editing (want a masterclass on how to use a segue? watch this film) … everything melds smoothly and seamlessly.

I’ve used the word three times already, and it’s a tool of both the stoner and the lazy writer, but there really is no other way of describing ‘Ocean’s 11’: it’s cool.

Suavely, stylishly, seriously cool.




*As well as getting a career-best performance from Julia Roberts.

** ‘Ocean’s 11’ was the second of his six – so far – actor/director collaborations with Soderbergh.