Film review: ‘Logan Lucky’

With “Logan Lucky,” it would seem that Steven Soderbergh is making another version of “Ocean’s Eleven” except with ?NASCAR and nincompoops instead of Las Vegas and lounge lizards. But the director proves that he’s absorbed the easy conversations and conspiracies of criminals from Elmore Leonard (whose novel he used to great effect in “Out of Sight”) to make an exemplary, down-home caper film.

It’s also worth noting that, as with “Magic Mike,” Soderbergh chronicles the decline of working class American jobs. Just as Channing Tatum once made ends meet laying Spanish tile in Florida, his character in this new film, West Virginian Jimmy Logan, is pushed out of a construction gig due to a pre-existing condition that would raise his employer’s insurance premiums. When he has to get patched up he hops on an RV for “free mobile health WV” and, adding insult to insurer-presumed injury, his ex-wife Bobbie Jo (Katie Holmes) now lives in a McMansion with driveway full of cars while he sleeps in a trailer with a broken-down pickup in the carport.

Luckily Tatum’s charm is undeniable in any guise, even a camo hat, a raggedy goatee and a hitch in his giddy up. He’s sweet with his daughter (Farrah Mackenzie), telling the beauty pageant aspirant: “The only thing I need a cell phone for is taking pictures of you.” He does, however, find himself in need of money for other things, and given his only other prospective gig is a seasonal one at Lowe’s Home Improvement, he resolves to relieve the Charlotte Motor Speedway of its cash holdings during the Coca-Cola 600.

He turns to family first, enlisting his brother, disabled Army-vet Clyde (Adam Driver), who can whip up a wicked one-armed martini and his sister, Mellie (Riley Keough, partial to neon underwear and tasseled white boots, channeling the same hustle of her remarkable role in “American Honey”).

The crackerjack plan they hatch requires the explosive expertise of one Joe Bang (Daniel Craig as you’ve never seen him, with Ric Flair blonde hair and a neck tattooed with the outline of West Virginia). His only concern, spoken at lugubrious length is: “I am in-car-ce-ra-ted.” In addition to breaking him out, he demands that the Logans include his less gifted brothers - Sam (Brian Gleeson) and Fish (Jack Quaid) - in the shenanigans. As they put it to the bemused Jimmy: “We’re value added to the robbery.”

In one of the film’s many, many funny scenes, Joe somehow MacGuyvers his bang with only a bleach pen, salt substitute and sour gummi bears shoved down some pneumatic tubing. He cautions his hesitant partners, “We are dealing with science here.”

“Logan Lucky” tickles the pleasure centers of the brain with innumerable grace notes in small performances: the ever-?bumbling Jim O’Heir as a construction foreman, David Denman as Billie Jo’s rich but insecure new husband, Hillary Swank as a late-arriving FBI special agent, and the imitable Dwight Yoakam absolutely slaying it as an overcome prison warden (he precipitates in the best “Game of Thrones” gag you will ever hear). Soderbergh is working so well that even the gaudy cameos by NASCAR drivers are hilarious.

He leaves little to chance, as the film is directed, shot and edited by himself (it is also possibly written by the same man, though he insists debut screenwriter Rebecca Blunt is a real person and not an additional pseudonym). Soderbergh has, furthermore, financed and distributed the film himself outside of Hollywood studios. The last step on the Logan larceny checklist is to know when to walk away - but we can thank goodness Soderbergh has come back to making great films.