No Sudden Move

Year 15, Day 84 - 3/25/23 - Movie #4,385

BEFORE: Don Cheadle carries over from "Space Jam: A New Legacy", and I forgot he's also in "White Noise" which is playing on Netflix - I could have dropped that one in-between, only I don't have an extra slot, unless I move "The Pale Blue Eye" to after Mother's Day.  A quick check of how I MIGHT want to get to Memorial Day suggests that maybe I postpone "The Pale Blue Eye" to May instead of April, and what do you know, that film links to "White Noise" so I'm going to NOT add that one here, I'll save that for May also because I can see how that film would help get me closer to "Top Gun: Maverick" if I choose to set my sights on that one. 

It's Day 24 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, and today's theme is "'Biopics" (all day).  Here's the line-up: 

6:00 am "Disraeli" (1929)

7:30 am "The Great Ziegfeld" (1936)

10:30 am "Sergeant York" (1941)

1:00 pm "Lust for Life" (1956)

3:15 pm "Yankee Doodle Dandy" (1942)

5:45 pm "The Glenn Miller Story" (1954)

8:00 pm "Patton" (1970)

11:00 pm "The Last Emperor" (1987)

2:00 am "Love Me or Leave Me" (1955)

4:15 am "The Life of Emile Zola" (1937)

I think I've only seen four of these: "Sergeant York", "Lust for Life", "Patton" and "The Last Emperor".   That gives me 4 out of 10, which takes me to 128 seen out of 283, down just a bit to 45.2%.  But come on, TCM, two of these films have James Cagney in them, doesn't it make sense to put them next to each other and get some actor linking going on? 

THE PLOT: A group of criminals are brought together under mysterious circumstances and have to work together to uncover what's really going on when their simple job goes completely sideways. 

AFTER: Well, at first that plotline sounds a lot like "The Usual Suspects", confirmed by the presence of one Benicio Del Toro, but it's not, it's a very different sort of film.  First off, the crime is set back in the 1950's, near Detroit, and it's got something to do with stealing something from a safe.  Then of course I'm also reminded of films like "Welcome to Collinwood", where a bunch of misfit, clueless criminals band together to get something from a safe, but instead of drilling through a wall to get at the "Bellini", the criminals here take a different tactic - they hold the family of a man hostage at gunpoint until he agrees to help them, and they've targeted him because he's having an affair with the secretary who has the combination to that safe. 

It's not until really late in the film, however, that we learn what exactly the document inside the safe is, and I'm not going to spoil it here except to say that it's got something to do with cars.  It's not that important, because the two crooks who get it aren't sure what it is, but they know that it has to have some value for someone, so they set about leveraging their possession of it (after tearing it in half so they can't screw each other over) to get what they hope is the maximum value for it.  

In the meantime, the two crooks (Curt Goynes and Ronald Russo) try to figure out who hired them for this job in the first place, and if that person or those people were intentionally setting them up to fail, or possibly to get killed. Since they were recruited by a mystery man who would not say who was hiring them, they figure it's got to be one of the two big crime lords in town, either Frank Capelli or Aldrick Watkins.  Russo happens to be having an affair with Capelli's wife, so it Capelli's behind the deal, possibly he was trying to get Russo killed.  But if it's Watkins who set the plan in motion, that doesn't bode well for Goynes, because he's been on the outs with that particular mob boss for some time, because he's in possession of an accounting ledger that details years of Watkins' shady deals, or something.  

Actually just deducing this much of the plot took a lot of guesswork on my part, since the film holds its cards pretty close to the vest, and very few facts get confirmed along the way - instead most attempts to learn details about their assignment seem to end with someone being locked in a car trunk, must be a Detroit thing.  However they do determine that the document is probably worth a lot more than they think, so they go back to the boss of the man who had access to that safe to try to figure out who HE was going to sell the document to.  This leads them to a meeting with an automobile executive, the first person who seems to both understand what the document is and also is willing to pay them for it. 

But eventually, all the people they made deals with along the way come looking for either the document or their money back, and so it's kind of a "Butch & Sundance" situation, it starts to look more and more like these two guys are not just going to be able to drive off with their money into the sunset.  Keeping track of all the betrayals and turnovers in the last reel is quite difficult, and even when Russo drives off with the mobster's wife and some money, you just know that there's at least one more reversal coming.  Goynes makes out a little better, because he's not looking for the big score, just the $5,000 payment he was originally promised for the job, and maybe there's a life lesson in there somewhere, if you can pay attention and keep track of who owes who what. 

OK, so maybe it's not on a par with some of Steven Soderbergh's other "heist" movies, like the "Ocean's Eleven" films - filming was delayed for months because of the pandemic, and many of the roles had to be re-cast, but eventually they got it made.  The end result is maybe a little hit-or-miss, but at least I was rooting for, well, two out of three of the crooks. 

Also starring Benicio Del Toro (last seen in "The French Dispatch"), David Harbour (last seen in "Snitch"), Amy Seimetz (last seen in "Lucky Them"), Jon Hamm (last seen in "Confess, Fletch"), Ray Liotta (last seen in "Hubie Halloween"), Kieran Culkin (last seen in "Igby Goes Down"), Brendan Fraser (last heard in "The Nut Job"), Noah Jupe (last seen in "A Quiet Place Part II"), Bill Duke (last seen in "Red Dragon"), Julia Fox (last seen in "Uncut Gems"), Frankie Shaw (last seen in "Jay and Silent Bob Reboot"), Matt Damon (last seen in "Thor: Love and Thunder"), Craig "muMs" Grant (last seen in "BlacKkKlansman"), Byron Bowers (last seen in "Concrete Cowboy"), Hugh Maguire (last seen in "Doctor Sleep"), Javon Anderson, Kevin Scollin, Lucy Holt, Claudia Russell, Katherine Banks, Lauren Rys Martin, Wallace Bridges, Lauren LaStrada, Tina Gloss, Dave Mishevitz, Patrick O'Connor Cronin, Michael Adams.

RATING: 5 out of 10 dirty dishes in the sink