Soderbergh's 'No Sudden Move' on HBO Max a sluggish, hard-boiled crime drama
“No Sudden Move” - ★ ★ ½
Curt Goynes, a two-bit criminal just out of jail, needs cash and lands a seemingly easy payday at the beginning of “No Sudden Move.” All he has to do is detain a family in their home at gunpoint for three hours and then he can walk away with $5,000. It's 1954 in Detroit and that sounds like an easy job.
Except this is a noir crime flick from director Steven Soderbergh, and that means nothing is easy except perhaps some double-crossing, triple-crossing and, befitting an Olympic year, the very difficult quadruple-cross with a twist.
Trust no one in “No Sudden Move,” a hard-boiled, ever-expanding con that rises from the ragged streets to the stately boardrooms of conspiratorial Big Auto and the corrupt police precincts of the Motor City. It's sort of a “Chinatown” for Detroit.
Soderbergh, as always, has assembled an insane cast, with Don Cheadle as the closest thing to a hero. There's also Brendan Fraser, Benicio Del Toro, Kieran Culkin, David Harbour, Ray Liotta, Bill Duke, Jon Hamm and Matt Damon. But this is no “Ocean's Eleven” — it's as dour and sluggish and deliberative as Soderbergh's other crime caper franchise is joyfully slick and stylish.
The film takes place over two frantic days, and Soderbergh is clearly trying to ape the look and feel of a noir melodrama that feels from the 1950s, using tilted camera angles, old-fashioned lenses that distort and language that skims close to the gangster-speak of pulpy old movies — “So what's the score?” and “It's a setup!”
But he and screenwriter Ed Solomon also want to elevate the material to more than just wiseguys in fedoras. So they've dressed up “No Sudden Move” with oblique references to racial tension, redlining and capitalist greed. It's welcome, but not enough.
Cheadle is perfect — and perfectly named as Curt — a savvy, mostly quiet smart thinker. Culkin leans into the unstable, dangerous energy we so adore in “Succession” and Del Toro uses his side-eyed menace to great effect. Hamm is a charming cop, Fraser is a scary bully and Damon can't conceal his boyish charisma even in a baddie role. Harbour wonderfully plays the role of a regular guy in over his head and Liotta still just has to stare to fill a room with dread.
Perhaps most refreshing are the female characters, so often in '50s noir relegated to vixens in pill hats or virginal moms in housedresses. Amy Seimetz plays an unhappy, self-medicating wife and mother who is stifled in her '50s life, and both Julia Fox and Frankie Shaw make waves with unexpected juice.
Shot during the pandemic, there's a nod to 2020 even in 1954 when the home invasion that starts the film includes men in masks. There also is careful thought into everything — the use of vintage wallpaper, the GM lobby scenes being shot in the actual GM headquarters lobby from 1954 and composer David Holmes apparently wearing entirely '50s clothes while working on the score — but the end result may leave you a little ripped off.
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Starring: Don Cheadle, Benicio Del Toro, Brendan Fraser, Kieran Culkin, Amy Seimetz, David Harbour, Ray Liotta, Jon Hamm, Matt Damon
Directed by: Steven Soderbergh
Other: A Warner Bros. Pictures release. On HBO Max. Rated R for language, violence and sexual references. 115 minutes