The difference between the heist movies made by Steven Soderbergh and the heist movies made by everyone else is that he takes as much interest in where the money comes from and goes as in the details of its transferral – the why along with the how. His thieves tend to be independent operators liberating massive sums from institutions on the winning side of capitalism, self-styled Robin Hoods for an age in which the phrase “wealth distribution” appears in public discourse with ever-greater frequency. They steal from the rich and give to the poor, as in the Ocean’s 13 con to force multimillion payouts from an elite casino to its patrons. Or sometimes, it just so happens that they are the poor, as in the boost from Nascar’s coffers by blue-collar West Virginians in Logan Lucky. All the while, the director has kept his eye on the big picture of who’s hoarding and who really deserves the cash in question.
The new HBO Max release No Sudden Move further develops his career-long thesis on economic iniquity, though that phrase’s academic air has no place in a thriller so dedicated to the immediate pleasures of its genre. Soderbergh has personally stated his desire to make crowd-pleasing four-quadrant entertainment after all the industry pushback to his artier work (he clocks 2008’s Che as his last project before giving up this particular ghost), and emphasizes the gunplay, slow-burn tension and tough-customer posturing that makes crime fun. All the while, he’s pulling off a daring gambit of his own, using the rollicking excitement of a stickup gone awry to distract the viewers and studio suits while he’s busy smuggling in all the subversive subtext he pleases. His latest ideological sleight-of-hand has the audience keeping their eye on a taut, nerve-racking larceny job, freeing him up to make the movie about race, industry and politics in 50s Detroit that he’s really after.
We’re whisked back to this period via rumpled vintage suits, the occasional bebop idiom dotting the dialogue, and a border-warping fisheye lens evoking a nostalgic past that may be more in Soderbergh’s imagination than cinema history. At any rate, he unobtrusively conveys the sociocultural context the average viewer will need: the Motor City is being carved up like a pie by the automotive giants at Ford, GM and Chrysler, leaving the human beings who have long occupied the area scrambling to hold on to the few rights they’ve got left. Screenwriter Ed Solomon doesn’t overplay his hand while establishing this much, allowing its connection to the caper at hand to arise when the time is right.
That delicate operation centers on crooks Curt (Don Cheadle), Ronald (Benicio del Toro) and Charley (Kieran Culkin) busting into the home of company man Matt (David Harbour, not just at his funniest but right at home in a cast full of men with beef-fed mid-century character-actor looks) to hold his family at gunpoint. They’ve come to compel him to steal some MacGuffin-type document, a vagary that a lesser film would allow to sit, its purpose of advancing the plot served. In this case, the precise nature of that manila envelope’s contents will be revealed, and with its revelation, the scope of the affair expands to proportions greater than these criminals and the pair of gangster bosses (the great Bill Duke representing the city’s Black contingent, Ray Liotta standing in for the Italians) after them. In their later scenes, heist films will often lead their characters to the realization that This Goes All the Way to the Top; Soderbergh and Solomon instead assert that we don’t even really know where the top is, and that we can scarcely conceive of the power and sheer enormity of influence wielded at the top.
As the simple task of retrieving the mystery papers goes south, the nearly two-hour runtime condenses more plotting and diversion into the sequence of events, the best of it following a pair of irate mistresses (Julia Fox, verifying herself as no fluke following her Uncut Gems breakout, and Frankie Shaw). The overstuffed, better-keep-up narrative suits the film’s purposes, occupying audience attentions to leave them unprepared for the nimble writing’s assorted baits and switches. It’s all part of the game that Soderbergh has mastered this deep into a prolific and storied career, in which the objective is the appropriation of corporate funds for scathingly critical yet casually enjoyable anti-corporate art. His most valuable skill seems to be in affecting the guise of commercial appeal to get his idiosyncratic, heady passion projects made. Whether he has to shoot through Covid (winked at by one hoodlum’s line about taking off his bandit mask because it makes his face itchy) or shack up with streaming giants uninterested in theatrical releasing, he always makes it work. Like the schemers and strivers peopling his vision of Detroit, the most he can hope for is to carve out and rule his own corner of a vast, ruthless business that he could never conquer in total.
No Sudden Move is out now on HBO Max in the US, and on 10 October on digital platforms in the UK.
