August 24, 2017 1 min to read

Logan Lucky

Logan Lucky is the funniest movie I've seen this year, and it's brimming with energy and self-parody.

by Zach Saul

I, like most who saw this movie; stumbled upon it by accident. It’s curious to me given it’s all star cast, and Seth Mcfarlan’s involvement it wasn’t promoted more aggressively. Boy am I glad I found it though because I haven’t had that much fun at the movies in at least a year. There’s an energy and tone to Logan Lucky that reminds me of movies like Back to the Future - a movie that accepts it’s place as an action adventure film, and leans in without reservation.

Adam Driver, Daniel Craig, and Channing Tatum are a really bizarre combination at first glance, but give the three of them a ton of credit as Driver and Craig (the two with less experience in the genre) are believable, funny, and have awesome chemistry. This is a movie that does an awesome job inviting the viewer into the slower pace people in the south enjoy, and and consistently takes these long narrative pauses that serve as punctuation and comedic relief. Anyone going to see Logan Lucky is in for a treat as this is a heist movie that isn’t hyper focussed on guns, blood, or guts but instead leans on the far superior clever thoughtful calamities that could only happen with NASCAR in the backdrop.

The Good: The stunts and the action sequences are both clever and thematically appropriate at every turn of the heist. Steven Soderbergh strikes the perfect balance between low brow hillbilly jokes, clever stunts, and cliched heist sequences that together make for criminals we can root for and alongside for two hours.

The Bad: This movie is no doubt derivative of Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven. Fans of the “oceans” franchise shouldn’t be turned off by this though, as part of the joy in watching Logan Lucky is that the film doesn’t apologize for what it is or try to exceed it’s billing. Additionally in the cons column: the soundtrack is nothing to write home about.