3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): No Sudden Move

2021, Steve Soderbergh (Kimi) -- download

While I didn't really take any proper hiatus, as I intended, there are a few flicks I have watched, or rewatched, since working at Cleaning Out the Cupboards, which included finishing some really old, half-done posts, that I won't be writing about. Maybe less hiatus, and more "finishing draft posts" ?

Anywayz, in returning to / resuming (watching and) posting, I have a ton of To Be Watched. In fact, I have an entire Draft Post which contains 10 years of movies I intended on watching, but never did. I also have those massive "add to my list" that are in every streaming services. And I have movies I have downloaded, and sit unwatched. Strange that I can remember, from the That Guy days, when I had seen every movie present in the cinema, and every movie I intended on seeing from the Video Store Shelves. That all said, this was from the "downloads" bucket.

Curt Goynes (Don Cheadle, Volcano), fresh out of prison, needs cash and accepts a babysitting job from mobster Doug Jones (Brendan Fraser, Journey to the Centre of the Earth), to work along side Rene Ronald Russo (Benicio Del Toro, Snatch) and Charley (Kieran Kulkin, Scott Pilgrim vs The World). Business man Matt Wertz (David Harbour, Black Widow) is to pull something out of his boss's safe, while the three gunmen watch his family, all wearing wonky eye-masks, making them look like The Beagle Boys. But this is a Soderbergh movie, so there is a LOT more going on, a whole lot more.

Of course, the job doesn't go as planned, and Goynes figures out they are being setup, which leads him to working out his own caper with Russo and Wertz. The whole thing centres around a mcguffin, the paperwork that was supposed to be in the safe, paperwork representing the designs for the catalytic engine, and a little Googling will tell you, this is the time when the Big Four (GM, Ford, Chrysler, American Motors) were going to be indicted under an anti-trust investigation, accused of purposely delaying "anti-smog" technology. The caper represented Studebaker-Packard trying to get the plans for the catalytic converter, assuming to be ahead of the game. Goynes works it out, to get the paperwork and sell it to the original buyer's contact Mike Owen (Matt Damon, The Great Wall), while also dealing with the bad business that sent him to jail in the first place, and has put him at odds with a lot of the gangsters in Detroit.

As is typical in neo-noir, the whole plot is convoluted, has lots of players moving about the board, and in typical Soderbergh style, has a turnabout at the end. In watching this all play out, I realized that Goynes, like many of Soderbergh's thugs in other movies, is a very smart guy. I like to think of myself having a decent brain, but I would never be able to see how things are lining up, and put a whole bunch of details and double-turns together in order to find a favourable outcome. In other words, I would make a terrible criminal, and I could never write plausible crime fiction. But it does make for satisfying caper flicks, and while very little of this movie tells you it is being a caper, more just criminals reacting to circumstances, its enjoyable once you see the players have played the game. And again, like in all Soderbergh flicks, there are little details he puts in that I really enjoy, such as the fact that Goynes is seeing walking everywhere, being fresh out of prison, having no cash, and not a lot of friends that would drive him around, but also affording us the fades from opulence to decrepitude, that the already gentrifying Detroit is going through, before it all fell down entirely.

Kent's post.