Logan Lucky review: Steven Soderbergh's blue collar companion piece to Ocean's Eleven

Steven Soderbergh, 119 mins, starring: Channing Tatum, Adam Driver, Daniel Craig, Riley Keough

It isn’t that long since Steven Soderbergh was announcing his retirement from directing features. In interviews, he struck a thoroughly exasperated note at the state of Hollywood and at the way filmmakers were treated.

One might have thought that he would break his three-year big-screen sabbatical only when he had something profound to tell the world. In fact, his comeback turns out to be a hillbilly heist movie, a good-natured, Dukes Of Hazard-style comic romp which keeps the sermonising about Trump’s America to a minimum.

The script by Rebecca Blunt (thought by many to be a pseudonym for Soderbergh himself) is peppered with in-jokes. It is also very ingenious in its own tricksy way. Characters we’re led to assume are dim-witted rednecks come up with incredibly devious and elaborate plans. This is the kind of story in which someone might get himself sent to prison simply for the sake of escaping for the day to commit robbery.

Jimmy Logan (Channing Tatum), the man with the dubious luck, is a “white trash coal miner” who loses his job. Logan likes John Denver music. He is good with cars but is chaotic, forgetful and so hard-up he can’t even afford his mobile phone bill. A former high school football hero, he now walks with a pronounced limp.

The only person who has any confidence in him is his young daughter who is due to perform at a “Miss Pretty West Virginia” school pageant but he keeps on missing her rehearsals. Tatum plays Logan with the same amiable, shambolic charm as he did male stripper Magic Mike in an earlier Soderbergh movie.

Logan’s younger brother and chief accomplice Clyde (a very dry and laidback Adam Driver) is a one-armed barman with a laconic and philosophical manner. They come up with a plan to rob the Charlotte Motor Speedway stadium during a Nascar cup event.

Logan has drawn up his own 10-point idiot’s guide for committing a heist. “Have a plan” is one instruction, “have a back-up plan” is another and “expect the unexpected” is also on the list.

The approach here could easily have seemed patronising. After all, Soderbergh is the city slicker director who appears to be making fun of his southern yokel protagonists. Thankfully, there is nothing sneering about the humour. The writing is very witty and the performances have such zest that the characters never seem like stereotypes.

It helps that Soderbergh casts actors you wouldn’t normally expect to see in hokum like this. Daniel Craig, in a break between Bond movies, plays a shaven-headed convict called Joe Bang who has a drawling accent that reminds you of Sheriff JW Pepper in Live And Let Die. In keeping with his name, he has a flair for explosives and can work wonders with sugar and potassium chloride.

Double Oscar winner Hilary Swank turns up late on an exasperated FBI special agent, struggling to unpick Logan’s incredibly complicated plot. An unlikely piece of casting sees Katherine Waterston play a travelling medical officer who was at school with Logan and still has a crush on him. Seth MacFarlane enjoys himself as a leering and obnoxious British racing driver and minor celebrity.

Logan Lucky is determinedly superficial. No one takes anything remotely seriously. The plot touches on divorce, unemployment, poverty and imprisonment but Logan and his brother are such cheery types that none of their everyday problems upset them very much.

The inmates in Monroe Correctional Facility are more worried that George RR Martin hasn’t finished writing his Game Of Thrones novels than they are about being behind bars. The only time Logan shows any real emotion is when he is listening to his daughter (Farrah Mackenzie), who may be made up to look like Little Miss Sunshine but still knows how to sing John Denver anthems with plenty of soul.

As he has shown many times before, Soderbergh is very competent indeed when it comes to the logistics of making a heist movie with a big ensemble cast. He keeps the tempo very brisk and manages to ensure that we follow the plot, however many outlandish turns it takes.

There are hints of Stanley Kubrick’s hardboiled thriller The Killing (about the robbery of a race course) in the set-up here. The film also stands as a blue collar companion piece to the director’s own Ocean’s Eleven and Ocean’s Twelve movies. It is not going to win him any Oscars but Soderbergh certainly appears to have recovered his zest for filmmaking.

Logan Lucky hits UK cinemas on 25 August.