After announcing a hiatus from feature film-making back in 2013, Steven Soderbergh is officially back in the director’s chair (though it’s not as if he’s been away these past four years, having worked on TV projects The Knick and The Girlfriend Experience as well as Magic Mike sequel XXL).
Despite the title’s suggestion, the Logan family could not be called lucky – Adam Driver’s droll bartender Clyde lost an arm in the Iraq war, while big brother Jimmy (Channing Tatum as an ursine, divorced dad) has been fired from his job fixing sinkholes. Younger sister Mellie (Riley Keough, tough, funny and underused here) fares a little better as a joyriding hairdresser, but she’s not superstitious. The three follow Jimmy’s to-do list (“Rules For Robbing a Bank”) to stage a heist in a bid to rewrite their family history, enlisting the help of local prison inmate and explosives expert Joe Bang (Daniel Craig). It’s bizarre to see Bond with a bleached buzz cut (not to mention a tiny tattoo of a star adorning his left cheekbone), but he’s one of the very best things here, whether flirting with a nurse in a slightly off southern drawl or fashioning a gummy bear bomb (“it’s an equal exchange of ions!”).
Though the prison break and heist scenes are slickly and efficiently staged, the film’s great strength is its good nature. Soderbergh sets his crime caper in West Virginia (cue John Denver’s Take Me Home, Country Roads), and features a beauty pageant, a saloon bar and a cameo from country-pop star LeAnn Rimes. But not all the film’s jokes are about the south; there’s a warm wackiness to the humour – like the way Adam Driver slowly draws out the word “cauliflower” (itself triggering the heist), or a gag about the Game of Thrones books.
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