Steven Soderbergh s Motor City mayhem washingtonexaminer.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from washingtonexaminer.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Steven Soderbergh’s
No Sudden Move, written by Ed Solomon, is a crime thriller set in Detroit in 1954. The movie’s timeframe coincides with that period when the city was at the center of global automobile production and had reached its peak population, some two million people. The genre, the locale and the era are promising.
Benicio Del Toro and Don Cheadle in
No Sudden Move Soderbergh had already made one relatively light-hearted film primarily set in the Detroit area,
Out of Sight (1998). Perhaps the director would take a more serious look this time?
The new work opens with a visually striking sequence in which Curt Goynes (Don Cheadle) ambles through a gray Detroit neighborhood. Just out of jail, Curt needs some fast money. A bulky Doug Jones (Brendan Fraser) offers the ex-con a considerable sum of cash for what appears to be a straightforward job.
Movie review: No Sudden Move tbnweekly.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from tbnweekly.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Schizopolis,
and
The Girlfriend Experience, which are so insular, they seem to be made only to tickle whatever Soderbergh’s fancy might have been at the time.
But the Oscar-winner kept his commercially-viable projects and personal experiments apart from each other, either as a balance between personal ambition and job security or just for kicks. Since his return to feature film directing with
Logan Lucky, however, Soderbergh has seemingly been experimenting with the layout of his bigger films. His last three movies (
High Flying Bird,
The Laundromat, and
Let Them All Talk) have taken stories that could’ve been flashy or witty and made them dry, under-stylized procedurals with big name stars running in circles and spouting bland dialogue. Why he’s doing this is unclear, but unfortunately, he shows no sign of stopping.