Review: No Sudden Move

Image courtesy of Warner Bros.

Steven Soderbergh has been responsible for a number of very good movies during the past 20 years — "Che" and "Magic Mike," for example — but his latest, the cynical period piece crime drama "No Sudden Move," is his best film since the late-1990s, early-2000s heyday of "Traffic" and "Out of Sight," the film which his new picture resembles most.

Soderbergh has assembled one of his best ensembles — and that's saying something — with this sleek and stylish, although not showy, film. It's great to see Don Cheadle in the lead as Curt Goynes, who's fresh out of jail and looking for one job with a big payoff that will allow him to skip town and avoid the numerous criminals who are gunning for his hide.

At the film's beginning, he meets a shadowy character named Jones (Brendan Fraser), who tells of him a three-man job that will involve forcing a man named Wertz (David Harbour) to steal a document from his boss's safe at work, while staying in the house with Wertz's wife (Amy Seimetz) and children (Noah Jupe and Lucy Holt) and holding them hostage. The other two men involved in the operation are Ronald (Benicio Del Toro), who's sleeping with the wife of a crime boss named Capelli (Ray Liotta), and Charley (Kieran Culkin), the possible loose cannon of the trio.

There's a lot more going on beneath the surface with these characters. For starters, Wertz is having an affair with his secretary, and the setup involving the document in the safe seems as if there's more than meets the eye. This turns out to be the case after one character gets bumped off early on, and Curt and Ronald decide to try to cut themselves in on a deal involving the Detroit auto industry — the year is 1954, by the way.

Meanwhile, a detective named Finney (Jon Hamm) investigates the aforementioned killing, and the Wertz family tries to hide what actually happened. As Curt and Ronald make their way up the food chain to obtain money for the document in the safe, they find themselves at odds not only with Jones and Capelli, but also a gangster named Aldrick Watkins (Bill Duke), who apparently wants both of them dead.

A meeting with a mysterious man played by a big name actor — who I won't reveal, considering he's not credited — shows further proof that Soderbergh is interested in power structures (see also "Traffic" and "High Flying Bird," among others), and takes the film in a different direction that ends up transitioning it from a straight-up crime picture to something more substantive. "I did not create the river, I am merely paddling the raft," the mystery man tells Curt and Ronald during a trade-off late in the movie. And yet, Soderbergh suggests, while figures like this character who are at the top of the power structure didn't create it, they've figured out how to control it at the expense of everyone else.

This is the type of film in which there are numerous times when the story could technically have ended, but it often veers off in interesting new directions, and we're never quite sure where it's going. But Soderbergh is such a gifted filmmaker that we're willing to follow him anywhere as the story suddenly lurches one way or another — the title "No Sudden Move" almost seems to be an ironic one. 

Soderbergh is an adventurous filmmaker — his work varies from the "Ocean's 11" studio movies to the experimental "The Girlfriend Experience" — and "No Sudden Move" might not find the filmmaker venturing out to try something new. It matters little. This is an excellent genre exercise with more substance than you might originally expect, and it finds Soderbergh working at the top of his game.