Movie Review - No Sudden Move

Depending on how you count them, this is the 30th feature film from director Steven Soderbergh. It's the 31st, if you count Che (2008) as one or two films, but this film is a crime drama that follows criminals as they scheme and plot, avoid police and try to survive other criminals. This is apparently Soderbergh's favorite genre. He's done so many of them that he could probably do one in his sleep. It's unfortunate but this film lives in the shadow of Soderbergh's great works like Out of Sight (1998), Traffic (2000) and Ocean's Eleven (2001). This film can't also help but feel derivative of those better films. Soderbergh has also had a trend of doing films that are inspired by true stories or real-life events, if not being actual depictions or off-centered biopics. There is a whiff of that trend in this film, although Soderbergh really comes at that trend sideways here. There's also another whiff of a trend that Soderbergh has been engaging. That trend has a sense of remove, a kind of cold, clinical detachment from his subjects. This trend is exemplified in Contagion (2011).

That cold, clinical detachment isn't a criticism for Contagion. It's the point of that film. It's appropriate for that film. It works for that film. The detachment came from this idea that the film never stays with one person long enough for the audience to become attached. As such, you never really knew who the protagonist was because there wasn't one. It's not like Traffic, which was an ensemble film, at least in part, where there were multiple protagonists. Instead, Contagion felt like there were no protagonists. In that sense, Soderbergh was giving us a true panoramic view of his story or situation. This film seems to be operating in that same kind of mode where Soderbergh is giving us a panoramic view of this story. The problem comes when Soderbergh goes too far in his panorama as he did with The Laundromat (2019). That film felt like it was too much all over the place. This film though feels more focused.

Don Cheadle has been in about a half-dozen or so of Soderbergh's films. Here, he stars as Curt Goynes, a man who was just released from prison. He lives in Detroit, 1954. He's approached to do what's called a babysitting job. It's not babysitting in the traditional sense. He's hired to be a thug in a home invasion. What's called babysitting is actually taking a woman and children hostage and holding them captive as blackmail. He wants the money that will come from it, but he doesn't want to kill any innocent people or double-cross anyone.

It's not clear how long Curt was in prison. We get some sense of his life and how connected he is in Detroit, 1954. A lot of his connections are to people in the African-American community who are involved with organized crime. If one has seen the fourth season of FX's Fargo, which aired last year, the depiction of African-American organized crime or Black gangsters is very similar. Season 4 of Fargo is set in the same time period and in the same geographic location. If anything though, this film feels more realistic than that season of Fargo. Noah Hawley was going more for black comedy and at times over-the-top black comedy in Fargo. Soderbergh has black comedy but doesn't lean into it like Hawley did.

Benicio del Toro was in two previous Soderbergh films, Traffic and Che. This will be del Toro's third film with Soderbergh. Del Toro co-stars as Ronald Russo. He might be doing a bit of race-bending because del Toro is Latino. He's Puerto Rican, but, in this film del Toro's character is referred to as "the white man." Russo is an Italian name and it's revealed later that Ronald has connections to someone apart of the Italian mafia or Italian gangsters. It's not that Latinos can't be racist toward Black people, but Ronald initially has a level of racism toward Curt that feels like it's coming more from a White man than a Latino one.

Besides his obvious racism, Ronald is very quiet and unassuming. He wields a gun but somehow doesn't seem as menacing or threatening. Like Curt, he doesn't seem to want to hurt anyone, and certainly not kill anyone. We don't get a lot of his back-story, but he seems desperate to do this job, probably because he can't do anything else, probably due to him having a criminal record. At the end, he becomes a bit of a weasel who will backstab or double-cross. Yet, there is too much of a detachment in either the writing or direction that we're never able to feel too much warmth for Ronald.

David Harbour (Stranger Things and Hellboy) plays Matt Wertz, a man who is an executive or top guy at some auto manufacturer. He has a wife and two children. He's also having an affair with his secretary for whom he's secretly plotting to leave his wife. On the day that he's supposed to tell his wife about his affair, Curt and Ronald invade his house and take him and his family hostage. Watching his day completely unravel is an interesting through-line in this film, but it feels more interesting than those of Curt and Ronald, which seems problematic

Rated R for violence, some language and sexual references.
Running Time: 1 hr. and 55 mins.

Available on HBO Max.