![]() ![]() There’s the basic heist set-up and then everything that happens in the aftermath is a result of character, of watching these specific characters do or not do things due to their personal foibles. ![]() In Leonard’s work and in this film, the crime narrative is not constructed like clockwork, but rather improvised. While No Sudden Move isn’t technically based on an Elmore Leonard work-Ed Solomon wrote the screenplay-and doesn’t rely on humour to the extent Leonard does, it does share his penchant for easygoing pacing and character-based plotting. Channeling the maxim of the title, Cheadle gives a patient performance in a patient film, one that doesn’t rush with the plotting and is content to slow things down as characters think their way out of one blunder after another. Just watch the way he watches others in this film, how he stays in the corner of a room and reads the performers opposite him it’s subtle, physical performing at its finest. Cheadle is especially good in the lead as Curt, bringing his voice down to a low growl, generally keeping quiet and watching others in order to use their assumptions about him against them. ![]() The number of good performers in the film is notable: there’s Cheadle and del Toro, but also Harbour, Amy Seimetz, Jon Hamm, Ray Liotta, Kieran Culkin, Brendan Fraser, Bill Duke, Julia Fox, and a big-name star whose appearance I won’t spoil. Much of the pleasure of No Sudden Move is in watching the talented cast perform the many confrontations and recalculations. Curt and Ronald are forced to work together despite personal and racial animus towards each other, as each of them have different ideas of how to get away alive with the money. Of course, things don’t go according to plan-they never do in criminal stories of this sort. Two career criminals, Don Cheadle’s Curt Goynes and Benicio del Toro’s Ronald Russo, are hired to blackmail Matt Wertz (David Harbour), an accountant for a car company, in order to access a mysterious document hidden in his boss’s safe at the office. The film’s greatest pleasures come from its attention to character detail and its patient plotting of criminal screwups. It drops the romantic angle, but still situates a bunch of ex-cons and criminals in over their head in a heist plot in 1950s Detroit. Soderbergh’s most recent film, No Sudden Move, which debuted on HBOMax, plays somewhat like a warped period-piece version of Out of Sight. The film captured Leonard’s colourful characters, clear plotting, and impeccable cool in a manner only matched by Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, an adaptation of Leonard’s Rum Punch from the previous year. In 1998, Steven Soderbergh made perhaps the best film of his career in adapting Elmore Leonard’s easygoing crime novel, Out of Sight, to the big screen. ![]()
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