In Steven Soderbergh’s latest heist movie, Logan Lucky, “cauliflower” takes on special significance as a code word for criminal confederacy among the brothers Jimmy and Clyde Logan (Channing Tatum and Adam Driver). Don’t call them country bumpkins; the Logans are more like Robin Hood, by way of The Andy Griffith Show. When we first meet them, they both have honest jobs, but then Jimmy’s construction foreman sits him down and tells him, “I got to let you go.”
This is the inciting incident that sets the brothers down the path to a renewed life of crime in Logan Lucky. It seems someone in human resources saw Jimmy limping on the job, and now “the folks over in the big office” have decided his old football injury is an insurance liability. He’s fired for having a pre-existing condition, even though his disability is minor compared to Clyde’s loss of an arm in the Iraq War.
For the Logans, the cost of living in the USA is almost literally an arm and a leg. Jimmy’s construction job positions him as one of the working-class people who have helped build this country, laying down its infrastructure, but the American dream has failed him. Teaming up with the prison-striped safecracker, Joe Bang (Daniel Craig), and Bang’s own bumbling brothers, he and Clyde hatch a scheme to rob the Charlotte Motor Speedway, which has a cash highway flowing into its main vault via pneumatic tubes. Over the course of two hours, what emerges in Logan Lucky is a caper that lightly interrogates the spoils of capitalism, as if that were the true code word to unlock the movie’s themes.
Director Steven Soderbergh and gals costumed in prison stripes at the Tokyo premiere of Logan Lucky on October 31, 2017.
Everything’s for Sale at ‘Ocean’s 7-Eleven’
In a way, Logan Lucky almost functions like a spin-off of Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s movie trilogy. There’s even a line of dialogue where a woman on the news likens the racetrack robbery to “Ocean’s 7-Eleven.” It’s a self-referential moment, similar to the Ocean’s Twelve subplot where a Julia Roberts character poses as Julia Roberts. This time, Soderbergh can’t help but point out the contrast between Logan Lucky and his previous forays into the heist film genre.
For years, audiences saw Soderbergh sexy up the genre with good-looking stars in snazzy threads. His go-to leading man, George Clooney, bounced off fellow A-listers like Jennifer Lopez (in Out of Sight) and Brad Pitt. Ocean’s Eleven is notably set in a Las Vegas luxury hotel, the Bellagio. Its ending frames the successful casino vault heist as a thing of beauty and wonder, with characters basking in the glow of a water show in the hotel fountains at night. Soderbergh likened this to the stuff of “fantasy films” on Halloween this year when he took the stage at the Tokyo International Film Festival for the Japanese premiere of Logan Lucky.
In contrast to Ocean’s Eleven, Logan Lucky is a film where the glamour evaporates as the Logans and their dimwitted cohorts literally vacuum cash into trash bags in the bowels of the Charlotte Motor Speedway. Jimmy, the poor man’s Danny Ocean, is the kind of blue-collar guy who wears Charlie Daniels Band T-shirts and American flag boxer briefs. The movie opens with him telling his daughter John Denver stories while he works under the hood of his pickup truck. Later, at the Miss Pretty West Virginia pageant, her a capella rendition of “Take Me Home, Country Roads” inspires a heartfelt sing-along.
Details like these, along with Southern accents and goofball turns of phrase like “all the Twitters,” keep Logan Lucky countrified as it ventures into the official home of NASCAR, where drivers and their cars are covered in the logos of corporate sponsors. At one point, the Bang brothers tell the Logans that “NASCAR’s like America,” and, “It’s like you’re making us hurt America” by robbing it. Jimmy and Clyde live in a country where making an honest living no longer seems possible, not because capitalism is evil in and of itself, but because it facilitates greed and cutthroat competition. Even Jimmy’s daughter is caught up in this, as she gets all dolled up for the pageant like Jon Benet Ramsey, saying, “It only matters if you win.”
The Playlist reports that Logan Lucky’s credited screenwriter, Rebecca Blunt, is actually a pseudonym for Soderbergh’s wife, former E! host Jules Asner, whose family is from West Virginia. Maybe Jimmy’s daughter is her own inner child, rediscovering her down-home roots outside the glittering entertainment network. Whatever the case, Danny and the gang get away scot-free in Ocean’s Eleven, whereas the ending of Logan Lucky suggests that Jimmy and Clyde’s family curse may soon catch up with them, rendering their victory short-lived.
Still, everyone but the law (personified by Hillary Swank, who appeared at the film festival in 2015) is happy for now, as long as they’re getting paid. Even the Charlotte Motor Speedway’s people aren’t above committing insurance fraud. In Logan Lucky, the cars go round and round the racetrack, and LeAnn Rhimes sings the national anthem, but maybe there’s no more truthful moment than the end credits message: “Nobody was robbed during the making of this film. Except you.”
2021 Update: In ‘No Sudden Move,’ Crime Only Pays for the Higher-Ups
As I write this update, it’s November 2021, so it’s been four full years since I penned the above analysis of Logan Lucky after its screening at the Tokyo International Film Festival. Earlier this year, a newer Steven Soderbergh movie, No Sudden Move, premiered on HBO Max, completing the hexalogy of heist films he began with Out of Sight. If you don’t have time for a six-movie marathon, you could still chart Soderbergh’s evolving outlook on the genre (and capitalism) in an unofficial trilogy of sorts. Start with Ocean’s Eleven, skip its two sequels, and then watch Logan Lucky and No Sudden Move.
The wealth of the 1% is more important than the health of the nation in No Sudden Move, where the law acts on behalf of corporate interests, and the heist is America itself. Don Cheadle’s small-time crook, Curt Goynes, navigates an increasingly byzantine and perilous plot to avoid pollution control in “Motor City,” Detroit, circa the 1950s, while everyone around him looks to make their own financial gains at the expense of others. “I’mma get what’s mine,” Goynes reasons aloud, but the problem is, they’re all thinking the same thing, acting out of self-interest in a way that puts them at cross-purposes.
Here, the genre’s usual double-crosses become a microcosm for business without ethics, while class warfare and racial discrimination ensure that crime ultimately doesn’t pay for anyone but the higher-ups. At the top of the corrupt power structure is another Ocean’s alum, Matt Damon, whose auto executive, Mike Lowen, speaks of “growth” and “progress,” balanced on the backs of people with a lower socioeconomic status than him. “I did not create the river,” he tells Goynes, “I am simply paddling the raft,” as if the system is what it is, and Cheadle’s character should just know his place and go along to get along.
Embracing the same watery metaphor, the title No Sudden Move almost reads like, “Don’t rock the boat.” As Lowen says to Goynes:
“You do not ‘make’ the rules, ever, you follow them, even when you think you have autonomy, even when you think you have control, that is an illusion.”
These lines take on a deeper dimension when you consider that they were penned by Ed Solomon, the screenwriter of Men in Black, a $600-million box office success that still somehow hasn’t made a profit, according to Hollywood accounting. The fuzzy math that studios employ to cheat writers out of their rightful residuals shows how the movie business can be as guilty as any other industry of fleecing its working class.