When Jimmy Logan (Channing Tatum) a one-time high school football star loses his job at a construction site because of an old knee injury, he conspires with his one armed brother, Iraq-war vet, Clyde (Adam Driver) and almost silent hair dressing sister (Riley Keough) to rob the local NASCAR race track (site of his construction job) during the Independence Day race. However, to do this they first need to break imprisoned explosives expert Joe Bang (Daniel Craig) out of prison to blow the underground vault and then return him back inside, all in one frantic day!
What follows is a feel-good heist movie that Hollywood used to churn with abandon, although back in those days, the crooks never won, or seldom got away with the swag. This features a glorious, lovable cast of social misfits, a fucking kick-arse soundtrack and a lightness of touch which ultimately becomes rather jarring, because it masks the fact that beneath the surface this film is as hollow as an egg shell. There is nothing beyond the characters doing their thang to David Holmes choice chunes to hold your attention, and after awhile mine started to wander.
There's never any doubt our lovable heroes won't win and the actual heist aspect of the movie is so perfectly carried out without incident or threat that it totally takes away from the fact that the Logan family are supposed to be a bunch of dim, bad-luck cursed hicks, we're told endlessly that they suffer from bad luck, and yet despite the knee injury and the lost hand, neither of the boys seem that unlucky. Jimmy has a loving relationship with his daughter, while Clyde runs the local bar, and yet wherever they go, this mythical unlucky curse is used to define them, it's shorthand for any actual character traits. As for the actual heist, which takes up a large portion of this film, you just watch it unravel, wondering how it all pieces together. Normally in these sort of films we'd see our band of anti-heroes practicing and getting better before the actual job, but not so here. Bang the day of the heist arrives and bam our heroes carry out, with perfect synchronicity, the heist. And as with every Soderbergh heist film, there's a nifty 'how did they do that' montage sequence at the end of the film to show you all the stuff he kept hidden.
This isn't all bad news, because we want these losers to win, they deserve it. And besides, there's no real victims here because the money stolen is covered by insurance and it belongs to some faceless corporation and not some individual, so you know it's all good. And also no one dies, not even during a prison riot.
The trailer makes this film look a lot funnier than it actually was, it's not a bad film, not by a long stretch but it's just so flimsy and straight forward that it ultimately just feels like Ocean's 11-Lite. In fact, I think Soderbegh actually knows this because during a news report following the heist the news presenter describes this as an Ocean's 7-11. Gone are the smooth talking, hi-rolling, super rich con men robbing Las Vegas replaced by a gang of blue-colar red-necks.
Come for the trailer, stay for the music and enjoy it while it's on, cos once it's over you'll forget you ever saw it.
7/10
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