![]() Along with the documents, there’s a second MacGuffin, Watkins’s record book, which has gotten loose and which threatens his local criminal empire. Ronald is also involved in (avoiding spoilers) an adulterous relationship, and it’s hinted that Curt, too, was in a relationship before he went to prison, and that the woman in question ended it while he was incarcerated. There are also tales of romance: Forbert’s secretary, Paula Cole (Frankie Shaw), is Matt’s lover, and Matt’s wife, Mary (Amy Seimetz), finds out. Their plan is to get hold of the documents themselves and involve two Mob bosses, Aldrich Watkins (Bill Duke) who’s Black, and Frank Capelli (Ray Liotta), who’s white, in a scheme to sell them.Īlong with the gangland story, however, comes a tale of corporate espionage: the man who’s been coerced to steal the documents is Matt Wertz (David Harbour), a middle manager at General Motors whose boss, Mel Forbert (Hugh Maguire), possesses them, knowing full well that other executives at other companies covet the technology that they outline. Leaving a corpse and deceptions in his wake, Curt teams up separately with Ronald to profit from the turmoil. But the supposedly easy job-for which Curt is teamed with two partners in crime who are complete strangers to him and to each other, Ronald Russo (Benicio del Toro) and Charley Barnes (Kieran Culkin)-turns into a bloody mess. His friend Jimmy (the late Craig muMs Grant), who runs a Black barbershop, points him to the back alley where a pompous white man named, of all things, Doug Jones (Brendan Fraser), is waiting for him with a five-thousand-dollar offer to “babysit” (i.e., hold hostage), for three hours, the family of a man who’s thereby being forced to steal some corporate documents and deliver them to his handlers. The movie is set in Detroit, in 1954, where Curt Goynes (Don Cheadle), who has just been released from prison, wants to make five thousand dollars in a hurry, in order to reacquire land unjustly taken from him. “No Sudden Move” (which comes out in theatres and on HBO Max on Thursday) is far from unpleasurable but even further from substantial it’s a cinematic nostalgia trip that appears aimed at viewers hoping that Soderbergh will return to his manner of the nineties, and at critics lamenting the death of the mid-budget drama for adults that studios used to make. But where “Zola” is a revelation, “No Sudden Move” is a retread, an effortful reanimation of a genre with stylistic inspirations that, for all their fleeting pleasures, only adorn the action without reimagining it-and with serious themes that are merely leveraged as plot points. ![]() ![]() Like Janicza Bravo’s extraordinary new film, “Zola,” the new Steven Soderbergh film, “No Sudden Move,” is the story of a Black person who is lured into a dangerous criminal scheme by a white person-and, like Bravo, Soderbergh films with a distinctive, personalized flair. ![]()
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