Logan Lucky: Steven Soderbergh returns from retirement
By
David Walsh
26 August 2017
Directed by Steven Soderbergh; written by Rebecca Blunt
The new film by Steven Soderbergh, Logan Lucky, is set in West Virginia and North Carolina and involves the robbery of the Charlotte Motor Speedway during a major race.
Jimmy Logan (Channing Tatum) loses his job at the Motorway due to a “pre-existing” health condition, a leg injury, which previously ended a promising football career. His former wife (Katie Holmes) is threatening to move to Virginia, making it more difficult for him to see his young daughter, Sadie. The situation of Jimmy’s younger brother Clyde (Adam Driver), who lost a hand serving in the Iraq war and now works as a bartender, is not a good one either.
The brothers, along with their sister Mellie (Riley Keough), plan a heist of the race track that requires the participation of safecracker and explosives expert Joe Bang (Daniel Craig), now in prison. The latter insists on bringing in his two brothers, Sam (Brian Gleeson) and Fish (Jack Quaid). Clyde gets himself arrested and sent to the same institution as Bang. The two plan to break out of the prison during a “riot” and participate in the robbery, and return to jail during the commotion.
here are various other plot strands, some of them red herrings. Jimmy and Clyde tangle in an early scene with Max Chilblain (Seth MacFarlane), a pretentious British businessman and race car sponsor, in an unlikely bar brawl. Chilblain and his “clean living” driver, Dayton White (Sebastian Stan), will later figure as possible witnesses of the motorway robbery. Jimmy encounters a former high school classmate (Katherine Waterston), now a nurse in a free mobile health…