Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
No Sudden Move, now on HBO Max, may be seen as Steven Soderbergh’s truest return to form, and this time we mean it. It’s shot in Detroit, like parts of his masterwork, Out of Sight; it’s rangy and ambitious, like Traffic; it’s loaded with talent, like Ocean’s 11. He assembles some from within his stable and some from without — Don Cheadle, Benicio del Toro, David Harbour, Jon Hamm, Ray Liotta, Brendan Fraser (!) and [NAME REDACTED, ALTHOUGH YOU MIGHT ALREADY KNOW IT, AND NO, SORRY, IT’S NOT STREEP]. The thought that someone might look at the aforementioned facts and not want to press play seems beyond the pale.
NO SUDDEN MOVE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: Detroit. 1954. Fedoras and ties. Culottes and curlers. Big General Motors boats. Curtis Goynes (Cheadle) walks into a brown room with yellow lighting and agrees to a gig that’ll give him $2,000 now and $3,000 when it’s done. It’s a three-man job, “babysitting” for three hours. Sounds too good to be true. That’s why Curtis packs a pistol in his belt. He meets up with the other two guys, Ronald Russo (del Toro) and Charley (Kieran Culkin). They drive to a nice little brick house and put on masks before they start pointing their guns at children and telling them to act like this is “exactly like a normal Monday.” They need the kids’ father, Matt Wertz (Harbour), to go into work and open his boss’ safe and remove a document and bring it back to them. Then they’ll leave his wife (Amy Seimetz) and kids to resume their normal Monday without guns being pointed at them.
With Charley in his back seat, Matt sweats and flusters his way to the office, strolls hurriedly through the lobby past a light-blue Corvette behind velvet ropes. Must work at GM. Matt doesn’t know the combination to the safe but, as Charley puts it, he “knows the combination to the secretary.” That’s been a source of some tension in the Weitz household, so the guy has two pots boiling on the stove here. Matt navigates the secretary and gets to the safe and the document isn’t there. Shit. Now what. You can just smell the flop on this guy. His hornrims are sliding down his nose. He goes back down to Charley in the car and hands over an envelope anyway and if we stop to pause for a sec, we’ll wonder when the players here will realize it’s not what they want, and also when something awful will happen.
This so far is like six, seven percent of the plot. It essentially follows a couple of these people as they push a MacGuffin up a mountain to a bigger payday than just 5,000 bucks. Lining their path is a large ensemble of characters, some of whom get their own little MacGuffins to chase and fumble, and their screen time ranges from “not enough” to “slightly more than supporting”: Fraser as a tough-guy middleman crook, Hamm as a detective, Liotta as an upper-management mobster, Bill Duke as a boss in a fur coat and cane, Julia Fox as a not-quite-a-houswife, [REDACTED] as maybe the worst, just the worst. All have angles. Angles angles angles. There’s violence, there’s jokes, there’s crookedness in basements, there’s crookedness in swank boardrooms. There’s something about the catalytic converter. And there’s a point deep in the movie where a character sighs, “My god, it’s only Tuesday.”
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: I think I covered this already, but to clarify: No Sudden Move is no Out of Sight or Traffic (or The Limey, for that matter), but it’s something more than just Ocean’s 11.
Performance Worth Watching: Well, Fraser’s enjoyably against-type performance falls into the “not enough” category. And even though del Toro foregoes his trademark showiness — the man’s eyebrow work is unmatched, I tell you — for amusing understatement, let’s go with the ever-underrated Cheadle. It’s a small wonder to see him play a slightly empathetic, more than slightly shady man who’s world-weary enough to make him the unassumingly smartest man in most rooms. But he definitely isn’t the richest man in those rooms, and that is, of course, significant.
Memorable Dialogue: An especially delightful gem from Ed Solomon’s script:
Ronald: Is that what I think it is?
Curtis: Depends on what you think it is.
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: Soderbergh’s wide-angle shots are persistent, for that feeling of fuzzy-on-the-edges heightened reality. Late, very late, in No Sudden Move, he composes a two-shot in which the principals, playing corrupt characters who should be men of at least some level of virtue, are stretched and distorted, and the focal point is empty, the space between them. It’s a subtly contemplative beat during a climactic moment illustrating who Detroit’s real power players are. (One devastating quip foreshadows this scene: “Urban renewal? More like negro removal.)
So the film is substantive, but it also features a scene in which a character played by Ray Liotta malaprops “catalytic converter” as “Cadillac convertible.” The clever, shrewdly layered screenplay is wrought with switchbacks and twists, and Soderbergh directs with a bounce in his step, a touch bouncier than in recent outings The Laundromat and Let Them All Talk, and maybe even his 2017 comic lark Logan Lucky. He’s one of the great living directors, his style instantly identifiable from the opening shot and first notes of the score. He manages to make a film that’s violent, a little disquieting and textured with implicit meaning seem light and playful.
No Sudden Move feels like filmmaking for the sheer pleasure of doing it. You can enjoy it as a thriller that stacks up double-, triple- and quadruple-crosses higher than Dagwood Bumstead can stack a sandwich. You can enjoy it as another sumptuously shot collection of images, dynamically assembled. Or you can enjoy it as a subtextual story about Detroit in transition, from an international hub of industry to a deeply troubled and divided city. Weaving among all three is a joy.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Yes, you’d be crazy not to want to watch this.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.
