Whenever Steven Soderbergh makes a heist film, it gets the heart pumped! This man knows how to scheme robbery plans on a near perfection scale! And the case is the same with Logan Lucky. We see a motorsports complex theft attempt for the first time on film, which was something new and exciting for the viewers!
Like always, the filmmaker paid attention to details involved with the strategy as it fleshed out right in front of our eyes. Wooden block to transport human bodies, cockroaches and birthday cake were some of the latest additions we've not seen before being used for heisting purposes. As much as the stratagem ran its course from start to end in yielding a successful job, many questionable coincidences took away the practicality. Eating cake inside a vault, ticketing a purple Eldorado or doors in prison closing on time for emergency were really lucky happenstances that audience would find implausible occurring in favor of the plot to the T whenever needed be.
This is not to say the heist wasn't fun. In fact, it's the best aspect of the motion picture! Although much of it went on smooth without many hurdles, guards' visitation and construction work finishing early were tension inducing! Joe Bang (Daniel Craig) explaining the science behind the explosives and Clyde Logan's (Adam Driver) artificial hand being sucked into the vacuum tube were hilarious! When Joe Bang constructed the gummy bear bomb to break open the vault, thoughts were always in our minds whether this guy's serious or simply trolling heavily, only to be heightened when the mixture got rejected for the first time. Once it proved to function, it was a huge surprise! Speaking of what's hilarious, comedy in the film was only so-so for the majority, with certain ones like the prison discussion about Game of Thrones being unnecessary, out-of-place or forced-in as a pop culture related joke for the concurrent day audience.
Coming back to the earlier point mentioned, Steven Soderbergh's cinematography under the pseudonym Peter Andrews, helped him emphasize the information he wanted to highlight! The camera was easy on the eyes! It directed you with precision where to focus! Framings were beautiful, as it were the symmetries achieved through shot compositions. For instance, look out for the onesie pant line aligned on the door's as the push-up went up and down, up and down.
One of the main issues with the feature was, it had a mechanical plot. It's more like chronological steps taken to pull off a crime rather than having structural development in terms of the characters or at least, the protagonist. If the execution came with nodes of progress for the character arc attached to it, the picture would have been a much, much better one! It deserved to be!
However, it would be unfair to say no efforts were taken to explain these personas in this story. In a small, enclosed society of West Virginia, we were introduced to Jimmy Logan (Channing Tatum). From scene 1, you'll realize that money has always been an integral problem in our hero's life. He lost his wife to a wealthy man, hasn't paid phone bills for a while now and to top it all off, he lost his job recently too. These dramatic reasons naturally pushed him towards stealing money as he was in desperate need of it. With average IQ dimwits as sidekicks and deemed unlucky siblings, these underdogs team up for the biggest job of their lives! Character building wise, even Clyde Logan was visually proclaimed as being able to operate with one hand just fine.
Even with all these information, we still weren't given any particularly solid reason to root for the protagonist or the other characters to make it. This is exactly why character development is crucial! Sadly, Logan Lucky has only a minimum amount of it in writing. Most of the scenes did not have the hero present at all! Katherine Waterston, Seth MacFarlane and Sebastian Stan only had small, insignificant parts to play. If these extras were removed and the time allocated for them was dedicated to build our hero instead, the result would have been different.
The writer-director has gathered a prominent set of casts with good performances. Daniel Craig was fantastic as Joe Bang! Farrah MacKenzie was too cute as the little daughter! Dwight Yoakam as the jail manager who firmly believes everything is right with his prison was a funny character! Technicality wise, effects for the imparted hand was real. There were many expositional, long technobabble related to the pneumatic tube which could have been written better to show it visually rather than describing it verbally. But okay, we still understood the plan.
At the end, the film managed to trick you to conclude that Jimmy did abandon the money. The question "Why?" stuck to our heads until the resolution. And the revelation was excellent! When you think back, Jimmy had a point written in his list, reflecting that it's important to rob, but it's even more important to ensure a sure shot escape! His strategy made sure every suspect had an alibi. Even his overdue phone bills were part of this whole recipe! On the contrary, one can't help but to ponder whether this whole set up correlates with Jimmy's intelligence or not. It was expressed that he has been planning this for a long time, therefore maybe this information could have been captured on film as well to provide sturdier character stand. It just seemed off from the character's facet, that's all. With Sarah Grayson (Hillary Swank) continuing the investigation, it's an interesting ending ala cliffhanger to serve to the audiences.