![]() Their task is to “babysit” the family of a corporate drone named Matt Wertz (David Harbour, making flop sweat interesting) while he fetches the aforementioned papers from a safe at the office. (Unlike “F9,” however, Soderbergh’s movie is being released on HBO Max and won’t be showing in theaters.) Among the most intriguing are a pair of world-weary hoodlums, Curt Goynes (Don Cheadle) and Ronald Russo (Benicio Del Toro), plucked from the city’s warring Black and Italian criminal factions and hired for a lucrative if exceedingly odd job. (The director shot and edited the picture under his usual pseudonyms, Peter Andrews and Mary Ann Bernard, respectively.)įortunately, the people driving those cars are just as interesting, which may be what distinguishes “No Sudden Move” from “F9” as the finest automotive thriller of the season. The vehicles, popping out amid Hannah Beachler’s richly burnished ’50s production design, are lavished with loving visual attention, their bulbous bodies and gleaming pastel finishes sometimes taking on funhouse-mirror distortions as they cruise through Soderbergh’s wide-angle images. The executive suites of General Motors, Ford and Studebaker-Packard figure prominently in Ed Solomon’s keenly intelligent screenplay, while some of the most important developments - assignations and getaways, schemings and whackings - take place behind the wheel. As in some of his recent big-business milieus - the sports agent industry in “High Flying Bird,” the global shell-company hustle in “The Laundromat” - his vision of ’50s Detroit is both a simulacrum and a labyrinth, the staging area for a precision-tooled parable of late-capitalist vice and venality.Ĭars drive the narrative in more than one sense. Those implications are of particular interest to Soderbergh, whose playful sensibility often conceals a deeper rigor about real-world specifics. Unlike most throwaway plot devices, this one is rooted in actual history and its closely guarded secrets will have significant, potentially devastating implications - industrial, sociopolitical, environmental. (This moment could be a nod to “Goodfellas” - the gangster in question is played by Ray Liotta - or to Soderbergh’s 1998 Detroit-set classic, “Out of Sight.”)īut while that document might be indecipherable to most, it wouldn’t be accurate to call it a MacGuffin. At one point a gangster mistakes a Cadillac convertible for a catalytic converter, a mistake he’ll pay for symbolically when two men shove him into the trunk of a vintage Hudson. The plot hinges on a document coveted by some of the city’s biggest auto manufacturers, but the various lowlifes hired to steal it are, with one notable exception, happily ignorant of its contents. One of the slyer jokes in “No Sudden Move,” Steven Soderbergh’s smart, insouciantly twisty thriller set in 1954 Detroit, is how little some of its characters know about cars.
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