No Sudden Move (2021) **

 

Steven Soderbergh's directing career has been all over the place since he wrote and directed 1989's groundbreaking “Sex, Lies, and Videotape.” He did “Out of Sight,” “Erin Brockovich,” "Contagion," the soulless "Ocean's" franchise, and, inexplicably, the goofy-but-fun "Magic Mike."  Now, into this movie-starved pandemic year comes Soderbergh's latest, the crime caper “No Sudden Move,” and boy, are critics falling all over themselves to praise this movie! Me, I'm not so impressed.

Don Cheadle and Benicio Del Toro play Curt and Ronald, a couple of low level crooks in the 1950's hired to hold a family hostage while a 3^rd crook (Kieran Culkin) takes the man of the family to retrieve industrial secrets from the car company where he works. The job is inherently threatening, but the plan is for no one to get hurt. Things don't work out that way, and Curt and Ronald find themselves on the run from multiple criminal gangs as well as the police. They decide to get proactive and sell the industrial secrets themselves, a process that involves multiple double crosses as they parley with different parties while trying to figure out how much they can trust each other.

“No Sudden Move” is very stylish, beautifully-filmed, and well-acted. The pacing is good, and the movie reminded me for a while of the Coen brothers' classic, “Miller's Crossing.” The difference is that where the Coens bring everything together in the end for a satisfying conclusion, Soderbergh's story turns into a mess. Near the end, when Curt and Ronald meet the character known as Mr. Big (Matt Damon), Big goes into this long, scenery-chewing monologue that makes no sense in a film otherwise full of cool characters who spend their words wisely. There's also a big reveal about Ronald's past that adds nothing to the tale. Then, too, Curt's machinations give the impression, for a while, that he is always a step ahead of everyone else, but his schemes seem like nonsense by the end.

If you skip the last 20 minutes or so, “No Sudden Move” is a pretty solid crime thriller. Unfortunately, as with wine, a sour finish is unforgivable in a film. In the end, I found this film to represent a waste of a lot of talent on a half-baked story. I'm in the minority here, as most critics seem to love the movie, but I wonder if that's a symptom of how few movies have come out in the past year.

2 stars out of 5