No Sudden Move

 The effortlessness of Steven Soderbergh is so pleasurable to me. It’s probably his greatest skill, making complex, star studded films with brains and style that glide along so smoothly that they’re often overlooked as quickly as he makes them. You never feel this film straining, and I love it when someone very talented makes hard work look easy, it’s a special kind of thrill.

I love most of the super wide, nicely textured cinematography that has bothered some others; again it’s fun watching a filmmaking savant fuck around a bit, and Don Cheadle gives one of the year’s best performances, tempering ambition with desperation and commanding attention amidst a cast designed to get Letterboxed tongues wagging.

The narrative game here is nothing that new, a twisty, initially confounding little equation that eventually solves itself into a big “Fuck Capitalism”, a message that has come to dominate most of Soderbergh’s mid to late career, but never feels like its being played for cheap applause. This time the crooks are the automotive industry and the US government (surprise) while the victims are the small time hustlers and poor Black strivers that cant find a way to win the game, fairly or otherwise. The key to this plot working is the messaging emerges organically form the story beats, rather than gumming up Soderbergh’s fine-tuned machine, but the truth is never fully out-of-mind. The fact that this movie got lost so quickly in the streaming shuffle, all this talent and well intentioned hard work getting mulched without a second thought, offers a nice, if disheartening, fourth wall flourish to its Coens-esq nihilism.     

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