Logan Lucky is filled with terrific actors affecting terrible accents. Aside from Daniel Craig (who helps create one of the year’s truly great characters in convicted demolitions expert Joe Bang), Steven Soderbergh’s fifth and second-least-interesting heist movie is led by performers whose voices are so meticulously Southern-fried as to suggest they’ve never actually spoken to people beyond the L.A. city limits, and whose obnoxiously kooky mannerisms run together in a senses-dulling melange of oddball comic relief, starving the ensemble of much-needed balance. Channing Tatum and Adam Driver star as the Logan brothers, who decide to break their family’s legendary streak of misfortune by knocking over the local motor speedway. The job is elaborate but mostly unsurprising and relatively incident-free; the lack of a villain—or even semi-believable motivations for the assembled team—renders Logan Lucky simultaneously weightless and interminable. This isn’t “Raising Arizona meets Ocean’s Eleven”. It’s “Duck Dynasty meets Ocean’s Twelve”.
Welcome to Kicking the Seat!
Ian Simmons launched Kicking the Seat in 2009, one week after seeing Nora Ephron’s Julie & Julia. His wife proposed blogging as a healthier outlet for his anger than red-faced, twenty-minute tirades (Ian is no longer allowed to drive home from the movies).
The Kicking the Seat Podcast followed three years later and, despite its “undiscovered gem” status, Ian thoroughly enjoys hosting film critic discussions, creating themed shows, and interviewing such luminaries as Gaspar Noé, Rachel Brosnahan, Amy Seimetz, and Richard Dreyfuss.
Ian is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association. He also has a family, a day job, and conflicted feelings about referring to himself in the third person.