![]() ![]() ![]() “Its assessment won’t strictly be on how many people got eyeballs on it, but how did it accrue to the whole thing that we’re trying to do? You can’t quantify those, but I think they’re real.” “Now as we talk about streaming platforms, there are other metrics involved that involve cultural chatter and what a certain project means for that platform at that moment in time,” Soderbergh says. Soderbergh’s new film, No Sudden Move, is something of a poster child for the new Hollywood paradigm, releasing to streaming in parts of the world but in traditional bricks and mortar cinemas in others (it will now stream in Australia, after its planned cinema release was nixed by national lockdowns). And director Steven Soderbergh, whose filmography clocks in at $US2.2 billion in box office receipts, is realistic about how to keep those numbers ticking over as the pandemic plays havoc with traditional cinema. ![]() But it is also a city of ticket sellers and accountants. Two and a half stars out of four.Normal text size Larger text size Very large text sizeĪt first flush, Hollywood is a town of dreamers and magic makers. Pictures release that streams on HBO Max beginning July 1, is rated R for “language throughout, some violence and sexual references.” Running time: 115 minutes. We suggest you put it in your streaming queue but make no sudden move for it. (“You are under the illusion of control,” our hero is told.) With so many murky motives, there's little to care about, no way to anticipate the next con and no sense of real peril. The film seems to say the world is a plutocracy and there's nothing anyone can do about it. The double-crosses aren't fun and yet there's not enough social message in the bake. There also is careful thought into everything - the use of vintage wallpaper, the GM lobby scenes being shot in the actual GM headquarters lobby from 1954 and composer David Holmes apparently wearing entirely `50s clothes while working on the score - but the end result may leave you a little ripped off. Shot during the pandemic, there's a nod to 2020 even in 1954 when the home invasion that starts the film includes men in masks. Amy Seimetz plays an unhappy, self-medicating wife and mother who is stifled in her ’50s life, and both Julia Fox and Frankie Shaw make waves with unexpected juice. Perhaps most refreshing are the female characters, so often in ‘50s noir relegated to vixens in pill hats or virginal moms in housedresses. Macy is famous for, and Liotta still just has to stare to fill a room with dread. Harbour wonderfully plays the role of a regular guy in over his head that William H. Hamm is a charming cop, Fraser is a scary bully and Damon can't conceal his boyish charisma even in a baddie role. Culkin leans into the unstable, dangerous energy we so adore in “Succession” and Del Toro uses his side-eyed menace to great effect. It's welcome but not enough, like progressive window-dressing.Ĭheadle is perfect - and perfectly named as Curt - a savvy, mostly quiet smart thinker. So they've dressed up “No Sudden Move” with oblique references to racial tension, redlining and capitalist greed. The film takes place over two frantic days, and Soderbergh is clearly trying to ape the look and feel of a noir melodrama that feels from the 1950s, using tilted camera angles, old-fashioned lenses that distort and language that skims close to the gangster-speak of pulpy old movies - “So what's the score?” and “It's a setup!”īut he and screenwriter Ed Solomon also want to elevate the material to more than just wiseguys in fedoras driving classic cars with fins. But this is no “Ocean's Eleven” - it's as dour and sluggish and deliberative as Soderbergh's other crime caper franchise is joyfully slick and stylish. There's also Brendan Fraser, Benicio Del Toro, Kieran Culkin, David Harbour, Ray Liotta, Bill Duke, Jon Hamm and Matt Damon. Soderbergh, as always, has assembled an insane cast, with Don Cheadle as the closest thing to a hero. Trust no one in “No Sudden Move,” a hard-boiled, ever-expanding con to steal automotive technology, which rises from the ragged streets to the stately boardrooms of conspiratorial Big Auto and the corrupt police precincts of the Motor City. It's 1954 in Detroit and that sounds like an easy job.Įxcept this is a noir crime flick from director Steven Soderbergh and that means nothing is easy except perhaps some double-crossing, triple-crossing and, befitting an Olympic year, the very difficult quadruple-cross with a twist. ![]() Curt Goynes, a two-bit criminal just out of jail, needs cash and lands a seemingly easy payday at the beginning of “No Sudden Move.” All he has to do is detain a family in their home at gunpoint for three hours and then he can walk away with $5,000. ![]()
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