Logan Lucky is a comedy written by Rebecca Blunt and directed by Steven Soderbergh. The clever cast has a great mix of talented actors. The cast includes Channing Tatum (Jimmy Logan), Adam Driver (Clyde Logan), Riley Keough (Mellie Logan), Daniel Craig (Joe Bang), and Katie Holmes (Bobby Jo Chapman).
The characters come from a small town in West Virginia, and they all grew up together. Jimmy and Bobby Jo, now divorced, have a daughter named Sadie, and Clyde and Mellie are Jimmy’s siblings. Jimmy was a high school football star with a promising career until an injury forced him to make an alternate life plan. Clyde, his brother, was in two different “theaters” with the U.S. Military. He was involved in an IED explosion where he lost his arm, and he came back home and opened a bar to start his new life. Their sister Mellie is a hairdresser in the local beauty salon. Bobby Jo has since remarried to a Ford franchise owner, and Sadie is working towards winning her next beauty pageant trophy. Jimmy has just lost his job as a construction worker at the local NASCAR racetrack, and he wants to get back at them by stealing money from the track on a slow race day. He knows the system, so it will be easy…or will it?
Where the character Joe Bang comes in is the fun. Through some twists and turns the Logan brothers manage to get convict Joe Bang out of the penitentiary just for a day, long enough for him to help the brothers take the money from the vault and get back to jail. While all of this is going on, the daughter is in a pageant, the ex-wife’s hubby wants to move the family to another state, Joe Bang has five months left of his sentence so the risks are high, and the two other accomplices are, shall we say….not the sharpest crayons in the box. Needless to say Jimmy has his hands full, and comping up with plan a, then plan b, so on and so forth is where the comedy comes in. I am going to have to stop here with the story details as I don’t want to be accused of spoiling the movie.
I will say that it did start out a little slow, and character development was slow as well. However, the pieces started to fall together in a very clever way, and I enjoyed this process very much. I like when you think that this will be a typical story line, with the typical characters and it wasn’t. I also liked that in this movie the characters are simple minded individuals, but as a whole they all really need each other to be successful. There are a few people that are introduced in the movie that you think are not really relevant, until they are.
I would recommend this movie, for young adults and older. It has a great sense about it, it surprises you, and leaves you smiling!
Movie times: click here
Rating: Rated PG-13 for language and some crude comments.
