Easing back into moviemaking after the months-long covid shutdown seems like a mighty stressful proposition, and from the looks of the cast and crew credits for “No Sudden Move,” Steven Soderbergh decided to alleviate that stress by surrounding himself with people he knew. It’s a picture chock full of reunions: with his frequent star Don Cheadle, with Cheadle’s “Traffic” co-star Benicio del Toro, with Amy Seimetz (of the “Girlfriend Experience” TV adaptation), with Bill Duke of “High Flying Bird”; even Brendan Fraser was previously directed by Soderbergh, on a wonderful episode of the long-forgotten Showtime anthology series “Fallen Angels.” The script is by Ed Solomon, who penned the director’s HBO series “Mosaic”; the music is by his regular collaborator David Holmes; the producer is Casey Silver, who, as head of Universal Pictures, offered Soderbergh the picture that saved his career, “Out of Sight.” (And, of course, he’s again working with director of photography Peter Andrews and editor Mary Ann Bernard, wink wink.)
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Moreover, he’s revisiting his favorite genre, the crime picture. One could even frame it as another crack at the heist movie (following the “Ocean’s” series, “Logan Lucky,” and “The Underneath”). Still, it’s more accurate to place it in the tradition of the 1950s crime movies that were, in retrospect, the embryonic versions of his snazzy heist films — classics like “The Asphalt Jungle” and “The Killing.” Those films introduced and/or perfected many of the signatures of the heist movie: assembling a crew of specialists, documenting the to-the-second timing, tick-tocking the job itself, etc. But unlike “Ocean’s” and its ilk, the heist was not the narrative’s destination; even if it all went off as planned, the focus was on the unraveling afterward, the various ways in which the criminals didn’t get away with it (and couldn’t, on account of that pesky Hays Code).
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So it makes sense that Solomon places his story in 1954. The setting is Detroit, and our entry point is Curt Goynes (Cheadle), a professional thief just out of the joint. An associate points him to Jones (Fraser), whose boss is “lookin’ for a reliable guy to do some work.” Curt, eyeballing a plot of land in the Midwest, barely bothers to ask what the score is, but it’s three hours of work, “as part of a babysitting team,” for five grand. Curt’s partners on the job are Ronald Russo (Del Toro), whom he’s heard of, and Charley (Kieran Culkin), whom he has not.
As is his usual style, Soderbergh doesn’t fully lay the play out— he lets us figure it out as it happens, alongside his characters. Early in the morning, the trio invades the home of Matt Wertz (David Harbour) and his family; the scene is played out in deliberate quiet, and you can hear the birds singing outside as Ronald asks the son (Noah Jupe), “Are you a Sugar Smacks guy or a Trix guy?” Wertz is to retrieve a mysterious envelope from the safe of his boss, and as long as he does so, no harm will come to his family. It seems like a simple thing. It is not.
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What follows is a dizzying series of bluffs, set-ups, deals, double-crosses, and MacGuffins (I counted two, your mileage may vary). The complexity of the plotting overwhelms the picture a bit, which gets a little fuzzy in the middle – but it eventually forcefully snaps into focus, mostly by finding its spine in the simple notion that this is a movie about people under pressure.
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Not all of it is generated by the narrative; the racial tension between Curt and Ronald, for example, is played straight as an arrow by Cheadle and Del Toro (and given extra texture by Del Toro’s casting, as the character is white). These are stubborn men who do not trust each other but have to, at least temporarily (“I know why Frank wants me dead. Why does he want you dead?”), and they’re played with precision by two actors who, like the characters, have some miles on them. Cheadle is especially good, putting a crackle into Curt’s voice and a fire in his eyes—we never got a sequel to “Devil in a Blue Dress,” dammit, but this could easily be Mouse a few years down the line. Del Toro, as in his best work, mostly leans back and focuses on details; one nice touch is the idea that Ronald is a bit of a dandy, and when the crew gets together the night before the job, he brings along his freshly pressed suit on a hanger slung over his shoulder.
The newcomers come off just as well as the veterans, particularly Julia Fox (a honey-voiced delight as a woman with a secret or two) and Harbour, who projects a tough-as-nails exterior and then peels it away to reveal the impatient weakling underneath. He gets two truly marvelous scenes, one in which he administers a beating that’s laced with apologies, another of a long-overdue explanation for what got him into this mess (“Imagine this is two days ago that I’m telling you this!” he pleads, with such desperation that you almost want it to work).
Soderbergh assembles all of this with his usual fleet-footed grace, his work a pleasure (as ever) just to watch, loaded with inventive compositions and sprung editing rhythms (scene after scene gives us either an unexpected entry or exit point, and sometimes both). His visual experimentations aren’t altogether successful —I’m not as intoxicated with his wide-angle pans as he is— but the picture always looks and sounds crisp (Holmes’s score, as usual, is a marvelous throwback), and the curveball kinetics of his action beats continue to amaze.
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Yet Soderbergh isn’t looking to merely entertain. “No Sudden Move” ultimately has less in common with “Ocean’s 11” than “High Flying Bird” or “The Girlfriend Experience,” films where genuine social and economic concerns fuel the drama and conflict, and the brilliance with which he and Solomon fold that element in, with a meeting of common and white-collar criminals that seems to violate “all laws of history, nature, and class – no, caste”… well, that’s a little bit of a miracle. Then again, this filmmaker performs those all the time. [A-]
