![]() It feels a bit like Soderbergh wanted to make a movie about redlining, urban renewal, and the car industry but that felt like too much work, so he made a “fun” heisty thing in which the characters occasionally pay lip service to those issues instead. ![]() The MacGuffin might as well have been a briefcase filled with loose Skittles for all the difference it would’ve made to the plot. And even with the big delay, No Sudden Move is not The Insider. I understand delayed gratification, but even Sting would’ve checked out by now. This information is delivered as if it’s a bombshell, as if Soderbergh secretly had been making The Insider this whole time and we only just found out at the movie’s 70-minute mark. We’ll call it “the MacGuffin.” During the course of this, Russo and Goynes, who are both estranged from their former mafia employers - Russo’s played by Ray Liotta, Goynes’ played by Bill Duke - get a lot of ideas about what this package could be, who it might be valuable to, and what it might mean for them.ĭouble-crosses, triple-crosses, and quadruple lindy reverse betrayals ensue, until we eventually find out, about three-fourths of the way into the movie, that the document they’ve been chasing is actually the design of a Very Important Real-Life Car Thingy (I’d tell you, but no spoilers). The idea is for them to go to a man’s house, played by David Harbour, and babysit his family while a third accomplice, played by Kieren Culkin, takes him to retrieve a package. Their benefactors are parties unknown and their go-between is played by Brendan Fraser, newly fattened and with an abundance of excess neck meat that serves him well playing a drunken underworld guy. Set in Detroit in 1954, they discover in smoky bars and backseats of big cars that they’ve been hired to do a job. Scripted by Ed Solomon ( Bill & Ted, Now You See Me, Men In Black) we follow two ex-cons, Russo and Goynes, played by Benicio Del Toro and Don Cheadle. No Sudden Move doesn’t feel exactly like experimentation, so much as Soderbergh just sort of forgot to tell us what it was about. With so prolific a resume and such a gulf between his great movies and his B-sides, the obvious question a new Soderbergh movie raises is, will this be something inspired or will it feel like he’s experimenting on me? Steven Soderbergh directs this HBO Max streamer, his first of 2021, after one feature in 2020 and three features plus a short in 2019, by far the best of which was his basketball movie, High Flying Bird. You’ve been incepted! But making us care about fictional strangers is still the greatest trick of all, and occasionally that requires giving us more information, not less. In the past 20 years or so, there’s been a trend towards filmmakers-as-magicians, performing sleight of hand and withholding information and tricking audiences before the big reveal. No Sudden Move is one of those movies that feels like the filmmaker had a good movie in his head but he never bothered trying to translate it to the audience.
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