No Sudden Move Review: Steven Soderbergh’s latest robbery film is a masterpiece

Steven Soderbergh’s HBO Max film No sudden movement begins like all Heist films: with a supposedly simple job. A small team of criminals is hired with the promise of an easy pay day. They are supposed to put on masks and “babysit” a family by breaking into their house and holding them hostage at gunpoint. After three hours the job is done and they can leave the family unharmed and get paid. Of course it doesn’t work that way. It never does. After a short time everything gets out of control, while the score of a crew disintegrates into several schemes and a sinfully sharp cinematic chaos. And all of this points to the real cause of the violence: not the greed of petty thieves, but the putrefaction at the heart of the project called America.

Soderbergh, the prolific polymath of filmmaking who also directed and edited the film (that of Ed Solomon of Bill & Ted and Men in black Fame), turns No sudden movement into a staggering number of things. It starts as a crime fiction, makes a pit stop between sitdowns and power struggles of gangster films and somehow manages to get his lots

different threads come together in a historical drama about the destruction of an American city. It’s all the more dazzling that it does all of these while being fun and safe at the same time.

While there are a lot of characters to watch out for, No sudden movement mainly focuses on Curt Goynes (Don Cheadle), a petty crook in 1955 in Detroit with a big secret that few friends in the world left him with. He’s hired by Doug Jones (Brendan Fraser), who works on someone else’s behalf to get a document from a man named Matt Wertz (Strange things‘David Harbor). Also there are Ronald Russo (Benicio del Toro) and Charley (Kieran Culkin). Together, the trio plan to take Matt’s family hostage while Charley takes Matt to retrieve the document.

It’s no surprise this goes wrong. What is surprising is where the rabbit hole leads. As with any criminal story, a big part of the fun is what happens when a room full of people who categorically can’t trust each other is forced to do so even though they (and the audience) know full well that someone is likely a double cruiser. No sudden movement Layers in ambush and betrayal with a real sense of danger and comedy, but what really makes it linger is the way each turn of the plot circles a different part of the town it is set in, which is not just the narrative, but also broadens the scope of the crime committed and the definition of who the real criminals are.

Satisfying and rich on its own, No sudden movementThe tangled plot requires the viewer’s close attention, and a bit of contextual knowledge of 1950s Detroit goes a long way towards fully understanding its scope. (Here’s a good primer

.) The film feels like a magic trick considering it’s a determined crime thriller, but also a tour of the forces that turned Detroit from booming city into struggling city. At the beginning of No sudden movement, this transformation is already underway as their established black communities are being pushed out of their neighborhoods by monetary interests in order to destroy and rebuild them in the service of capitalism. In a way, it’s the history of every American city.

That depth makes No sudden movement the kind of film that rewards multiple viewings to see how careful research pays off and to fully appreciate the many dynamics at play. Fortunately, it’s extremely easy to revisit the film – No sudden movement is full of fantastic performances that bring vicious and funny and dark characters to life, sometimes all at once. Cheadle and del Toro, in particular, are convincing crooks who hate each other and have a creepy knack for keeping a steady hand even when the walls close around them.

But just about every actor in the film comes on screen with their characters perfectly calibrated for the moment. (Amy Seimetz, in particular, shines in the ungrateful role of Matt Wertz’s wife, Mary, adding a dark side to a character who spends most of the film’s time hostage.) That’s part of what a Steven Soderbergh movie is, too Enjoyment Makes: Seeing which actors will show up next for roles, big and small, and how much fun they’ll have.

Soderbergh is known for his constant experimentation. He plays with both how stories are told (like the nonlinear experiment Insane or the color-coded triptych by Traffic) about how they’re made and decided to make a few movies, like the 2019 Netflix drama Soaring bird, entirely on iPhones. No sudden movement isn’t that kind of flex, but it has its own visual flourishes. He shot it with a wide-angle lens that gives the scenes a fisheye look in a tight space and distorts the image at the edges of the screen. Most of the time it is only noticed when looking for it, but in other sequences it is inevitable, a visual cue that gives the feeling of voyeurism. The further in No sudden movement we sink, the more it seems like we are being pampered with a glimpse of something we shouldn’t be seeing. Cities don’t fall apart as naturally, and big companies are run by people who know exactly what they’re doing to us. Our downfalls are planned, and the stumbling crooks take the overthrow.

No sudden movement is now available to stream on HBO Max.