Post by Dracula on Jul 17, 2021 20:09:16 GMT -5
No Sudden Move(7/13/2021)
Celebrities love Steven Soderbergh and he loves them… sometimes to a detriment. Dude often assembles casts that are so packed with talent that looking at all the names on the poster gives you expectations for some of his movies that they aren’t even really trying to live up to. To some extent that’s the case with his latest film No Sudden Move, which sure has an impressive cast but which perhaps has more modest goals than the pedigree might suggest. On the other hand this crime film is probably more straightforward and accessible than some of his more experimental films where he seems more interested in noodling around with digital cameras than with the story at hand. Though not based on one of his books, this definitely feels like a bit of a tribute to the works of Elmore Leonard (the source of Soderbergh’s popular Out of Sight) and concerns a crew of fallible criminals who are all plotting and scheming against each other and it does a good job of introducing a whole bunch of characters in the first half and then have them double, triple, quadruple, and quintuple-cross each other for most of the second half. Ed Solomon screenplay doesn’t necessarily re-invent the wheel but it is certainly fun and you can appreciate its intricacy. I also think the cast shows up for the most part and do some good work, especially David Harbour (who’s almost unrecognizable) and Amy Seimetz.
But where I think the movie stumbles a bit is actually with Soderbergh’s direction, and especially his cinematography because I think his camera nerdery gets the best of him here. I don’t really know enough about the intricacies of filmmaking to fully diagnose this but he seems to be using some sort of weird-ass lens to film this thing that gives the whole picture an odd curvature of sorts, especially whenever the camera pans left or right, almost like it was filmed to be viewed in VR or something. I didn’t care for that at all and didn’t think it really fit the film’s 1950s setting. Maybe he was going for a sort of intentional filmic anachronism à la Michael Mann’s Public Enemies but I mostly found it to be an eyesore. Beyond that I’m just not sure Soderbergh’s heart was in this thing; you can imagine a version of this made by a younger filmmaker taking this script and trying to turn it into his calling card but Soderbergh kind of approaches it the way a guy with thirty films under his belt and ten more projects planned and you kind of get the feeling that he’s kind of bored with it beyond a couple of ideas he’s experimenting with. That’s a feeling I got anyway, but I don’t want to over-state it too much, even a bored and disengaged Soderbergh is still a better than average filmmaker and he’s working with some good material here and the resulting movie still has quite a bit going for it in spite of itself.
***1/2 out of Five
Celebrities love Steven Soderbergh and he loves them… sometimes to a detriment. Dude often assembles casts that are so packed with talent that looking at all the names on the poster gives you expectations for some of his movies that they aren’t even really trying to live up to. To some extent that’s the case with his latest film No Sudden Move, which sure has an impressive cast but which perhaps has more modest goals than the pedigree might suggest. On the other hand this crime film is probably more straightforward and accessible than some of his more experimental films where he seems more interested in noodling around with digital cameras than with the story at hand. Though not based on one of his books, this definitely feels like a bit of a tribute to the works of Elmore Leonard (the source of Soderbergh’s popular Out of Sight) and concerns a crew of fallible criminals who are all plotting and scheming against each other and it does a good job of introducing a whole bunch of characters in the first half and then have them double, triple, quadruple, and quintuple-cross each other for most of the second half. Ed Solomon screenplay doesn’t necessarily re-invent the wheel but it is certainly fun and you can appreciate its intricacy. I also think the cast shows up for the most part and do some good work, especially David Harbour (who’s almost unrecognizable) and Amy Seimetz.
But where I think the movie stumbles a bit is actually with Soderbergh’s direction, and especially his cinematography because I think his camera nerdery gets the best of him here. I don’t really know enough about the intricacies of filmmaking to fully diagnose this but he seems to be using some sort of weird-ass lens to film this thing that gives the whole picture an odd curvature of sorts, especially whenever the camera pans left or right, almost like it was filmed to be viewed in VR or something. I didn’t care for that at all and didn’t think it really fit the film’s 1950s setting. Maybe he was going for a sort of intentional filmic anachronism à la Michael Mann’s Public Enemies but I mostly found it to be an eyesore. Beyond that I’m just not sure Soderbergh’s heart was in this thing; you can imagine a version of this made by a younger filmmaker taking this script and trying to turn it into his calling card but Soderbergh kind of approaches it the way a guy with thirty films under his belt and ten more projects planned and you kind of get the feeling that he’s kind of bored with it beyond a couple of ideas he’s experimenting with. That’s a feeling I got anyway, but I don’t want to over-state it too much, even a bored and disengaged Soderbergh is still a better than average filmmaker and he’s working with some good material here and the resulting movie still has quite a bit going for it in spite of itself.
***1/2 out of Five
