In a culture soaked with theatrical emotionality, and mostly in thrall to a utopian view of history and human nature, there is something oddly relieving, even cathartic, in the jaded and the hard-boiled. Surrounded by the language of therapy and self-actualization, what really feels therapeutic, after a long day laboring in the salt mines, is to dip into a novel or film whose worldview is completely scrubbed of sentimentality — to take a long hot bath in a film noir or policier that describes the world as it is, and not as we wish it were. I think of my thrill when I read the first sentence of prosecutor-turned-writer George V. Higgins’s 1970 crime novel The Friends of Eddie Coyle, which became an equally iconic film: “Jackie Brown at twenty-six, with no expression on his face, said that he could get some guns.”
The filmmaker Steven Soderbergh, known for his stylish and witty crime films, understands this need for occasional, cleansing grit. He also understands that it need not be devoid of comedy, irony, or the absurd.
Sometimes, Soderbergh has embraced the lighter caper with humor, minimal violence, and playful romance. In the Elmore Leonard adaptation Out of Sight (1998), the paths of a federal marshal (Jennifer Lopez) and a career criminal (George Clooney) are entangled after they’re stuffed in the trunk of a car together — the kind of rom-com meet-cute that only Leonard or Soderbergh would conceive. The 2001 casino heist caper Ocean’s Eleven, a highly re-watchable, crowd-pleasing, sequel-spawning blockbuster, struck what seemed to be the perfect formula: A crew of eccentric criminals, played by a charismatic ensemble cast, plans an ingenious robbery, with the action heavily seasoned by jokes and snappy dialogue. Guys hanging out, being bros, committing heists. Logan Lucky (2017) applied a similar frame to a story of down-on-their-luck rednecks who decide to knock off a NASCAR stadium.
Then there are the darker entries in the Soderbergh canon, such as Traffic (2000), a drama about characters from different backgrounds whose lives are unknowingly connected, with soul-destroying and sometimes deadly results, by the narcotics trade, and the psychological thrillers Side Effects (2013) and Unsane (2018), which both concern psychiatry turned sinister.
No Sudden Move charts a course somewhere between these two moods. It’s not a comedy in the obvious sense, and it involves a lot of violence, but it’s hardly an exercise in harrowing darkness, either. Its sensibility is closer to the mordant, existential shrug of Coen brothers classics such as Fargo and A Serious Man. Imagine a man at a bar recounting, matter-of-factly and without self-pity, the story of how he once had a fortune within grasp, only to see it slip away. He chuckles, downs his drink, and says something like: Well, them’s the breaks. Welcome to America.
Soderbergh takes the winning elements of his previous movies (convoluted crimes, a gallery of rogues, an extraordinarily stacked ensemble cast), mixes them together, and sets them in 1950s Detroit. Working on behalf of a mysterious third party, a man named Doug Jones (Brendan Fraser) recruits a somewhat sympathetic small-time criminal, Curt Goynes (Don Cheadle, always good), for an armed job. Ronald Russo (Benicio Del Toro), who is having an affair with the wife (Julia Fox, of Uncut Gems) of his mob associate (Ray Liotta), is also recruited. Russo, who is a bit racist, is leery about working with Goynes, but he is also self-interested. The triumvirate is completed by Charley (Kieran Culkin, of Succession), who seems to know more about what’s going on than the other two.
Their job is to go to the house of a mid-level auto executive (Stranger Things’s David Harbour) and hold his wife (Amy Seimetz) and children hostage while he retrieves an unknown document from a safe at his office. (There is probably a debt here to The Friends of Eddie Coyle, which involves a very similar premise.) The executive has, incidentally, been having an affair with an impetuous secretary (Frankie Shaw), who controls access to the safe and whose cooperation is uncertain.
All does not go according to plan. Things go awry, someone dies, and the next thing you know, everyone is chasing this mysterious document, now sweetened by a suitcase of cash, around Detroit. Joining the pursuit are a law enforcement agent (Jon Hamm, playing to type), a black gangster (Bill Duke), and a powerful auto-titan (Matt Damon, in an uncredited cameo). Everyone is out for No. 1, and no one can trust anyone else, but they also need things from each other in order to win: It’s a giant, constantly shifting prisoner’s dilemma. Briskly and sometimes slightly confusedly, we speed along.
Aesthetically, and as an exercise in time and place, No Sudden Move succeeds nicely. The film is beautiful and crisp, with a moody midcentury palette: lots of dark blues, grays, and browns, occasionally interrupted by the golden light of the Michigan sun on a green suburban lawn or gleaming on the marble of a grand lobby. The movie is shot in an unusual, period-appropriate wide format, glorious for landscapes and pans, but with the idiosyncratic effect of curving in slightly at the sides, giving some scenes a fisheye appearance. It’s an interesting effect, if sometimes distracting.
Some of No Sudden Moves’s strengths, such as its brisk pace, massive ensemble cast, and intricate, manic plot, are also what create problems. With the exception of Cheadle’s character, we don’t learn anything about the players’ backgrounds or motives, and we’re so busy trying to keep up with the numerous machinations and double- and triple-crosses that we aren’t particularly invested in the outcome. Similarly, the film gestures to history and topicality (the auto industry, racism, redlining, the “urban renewal” program that displaced poor and minority people, white flight, the slow death of a great American city, capitalism), but those elements aren’t central enough to carry much significance and feel half-hearted.
But I did very much enjoy No Sudden Move. To compare Soderbergh again with the Coen brothers, I find myself wondering, a day after watching it, whether No Sudden Move is the kind of biting, darkly comic crime film that burns itself indelibly into one’s psyche (Fargo) or is closer to those Coen crime farces and capers (Burn After Reading, Hail, Caesar!) that are easy, even delightful viewing but seem to start dissolving from one’s mind the minute one exits the cinema. I’m not sure yet which it is.
J. Oliver Conroy’s writing has been published in the Guardian, New York magazine, the Spectator, the New Criterion, and other publications.
