There’s a lot of directors who’ve made great crime capers, but Steven Soderbergh deserves special recognition for his contribution to the genre. Nothing was more cool than the Ocean’s 11-13 heists, stealing in the most fun way possible. But even without those films on his resume, Soderbergh gave us the sexiest crime caper ever (Out of Sight), a superb racetrack heist (Logan Lucky), and maybe Matt Damon’s greatest performance ever in a heist/study on mental illness (The Informant!). Soderbergh has a way of imprinting each of his films with some style that makes them a notch above a typical entry into the movie genre. No Sudden Move is another wonderful example, taking a familiar story, even for Soderbergh, and making it something special because of his unique spin on the tale.
Soderbergh welcomes us to 1950s Detroit. Curt Goynes (Don Cheadle), fresh out of jail, needs a job to get back on his feet. So he gets hired by a mysterious man (Brendan Fraser) to babysit the family of Matt Wertz (David Harbour), who has information the mystery man wants. Curt’s radar goes up immediately, because accompanying him on this mission are two people he doesn’t know well, Charley (Kieran Culkin) and Ronald Russo (Benicio Del Toro), other low level thugs. As you might expect, this simple babysitting job doesn’t go as planned, and now Curt has to rely on these people he doesn’t know to get himself out of a really tricky, dangerous situation.
No Sudden Move fuses the two Steven Soderbergh tales that people love. The first half is very much is about “stylish Steven.” Our caper here starts out simply enough: we gather the random people necessary to get the task done, and we learn that Curt and Ronald are worried about a man named Frank (Ray Liotta), who clearly has power, wanting both of them out of the picture. So we’re uneased but enjoying that wonderful Soderbergh dialogue as we enter the Wertz home. Things go South pretty quickly, but in that beautiful Soderbergh way, the situation is handled not with guns, but with intermittent intense then sometimes wonderfully defusing dialogue, drawing the audience in and making us fall in love with these characters. The star of the show is the prickly Curt/Ronald relationship, forced into a tenuous but necessary partnership to stay alive. This means as the group splinters off into different pieces, we have multiple threads we are interested in, giving the audience an “in” into a new part of the story Soderbergh is ready to unfold for us.
Which takes us to the 2nd Soderbergh: the sprawling canvas storyteller (this is the guy who did Traffic and Contagion as well, don’t forget). The initial set up obviously has mysterious players like Frank that are going to play a role later, and what is being stolen isn’t immediately clear to these low level criminals. But what seems like a smallish caper in a medium town simply grows and grows into a bigger tale, culminating in this gigantic third act meeting at the Gotham Hotel in Downtown Detroit, which snaps the movie into place. Soderbergh takes all these little disparate pieces and small mini stories – marriage infidelity, business secrets, family drama – from what seemed like power players at the teime and ties them all into small tendrils of a larger tree of activity that incorporates much bigger themes and issues I won’t reveal for spoiler purposes. But that Gotham meeting and its fallout take the blurred understanding (Soderbergh helps with this by having strange perspectives at the edges of the screen) of our main characters and gives them clarity. Clarity, but not necessarily resolution. The fallout from that meeting is a potent, hammer home of the point Soderbergh is trying to make, and a sobering lesson to everyone involved to know exactly who you are and what your place is in the societal pecking order, and more importantly how to maneuver up that order in a way that won’t get you in trouble.
No Sudden Move is going to be seen as lesser Steven Soderbergh, simply because of the amazing career he’s had before this movie. But I would argue time might help this one. The last act really hit me hard, and further viewings may help make the movie have longer legs than we might realize. Although the big acting twist in the third act won’t hit as hard, I know I was surprised and delighted when I realized who was cast. Damn it Steven Soderbergh, you sly devil! Even after your “movie retirement” you still got that directorial magic!