Logan Lucky

Steven Soderbergh decided to leave the feature film industry after the Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra. But he decided to give screenwriter Rebecca Blunt her lucky break and produce her heist comedy, Logan Lucky. Yeah, more on her later.

Jimmy Logan (Channing Tatum) is a construction worker who gets laid off from his job at the Charlotte Motor Speedway due to his bum knee. His brother Clyde (Adam Driver) lost his lower arm in Iraq and now sports a prosthetic hand. There's supposedly a curse on the family that gives them bad luck. Jimmy's luck is about to get worse when his ex-wife (Katie Holmes) plans to move away with their daughter, Sadie (Farrah Mackenzie), and new husband (David Denman). Jimmy decides to do something about it by cooking up a scheme to rob the speedway's vault.

The Logans recruit convicted safecracker Joe Bang (Daniel Craig) for the scheme. Joe's brothers Sam and Fish (Brian Gleeson and Jack Quaid) and the Logans' sister Mellie (Riley Keough) join in. Their heist coincides with a big race on Memorial Day. A few of the participants have their doubts about the heist. So how will the brothers pull it off?

There is speculation that "Rebecca Blunt" is actually a pseudonym, presumably for Soderbergh's wife, Jules Asner. What is known is that Soderbergh edited and photographed the film under his own pseudonyms, Mary Ann Bernard and Peter Andrews. David Holmes, who is not a pseudonym for anybody, composed the fine soundtrack. Ain't that something?

The film gets going quickly in its 119 minutes. The heist is ready to go before the hour mark. There's plenty of entertaining gags which come out of the crew's relative inexperience. Meanwhile, a prison riot hinges on the last few A Game of Thrones novels, which have yet to be published. The film finds ways to keep things interesting after the heist. There's a strong moment when Sadie sings "Country Roads" at a Beauty Pageant when Jimmy arrives. There's a comically serious FBI agent (Hilary Swank) who investigates the crime; why wasn't she in the movie more?

The cast was great. They were likable Southern folks. Daniel Craig was especially awesome in an atypical role as the comically serious Joe Bang. The Logan brothers were a compelling duo. The supporting cast was populated by plenty of big names. There's Seth MacFarlane as a pompous British businessman, Dwight Yoakman as the overwhelmingly incompetent prison warden and Sebastian Stan as a harried NASCAR driver. They're all a memorable bunch of characters.

Logan Lucky is a nice film for the last days of summer. It's a good take on the heist movie that Soderbergh did so well with Ocean's 11. A few plot elements get abruptly driven off the road during the denouement but its amiable atmosphere speeds through. See it before it gets driven out of theaters.