- Title: No Sudden Move
- IMDb: link
Director Steven Soderbergh brings together an ensemble cast for 50s crime thriller and heist gone wrong. Don Cheadle and Benicio Del Toro star as two members of a criminal trio, along with Kieran Culkin, hired to hold the family of an accountant (David Harbour) hostage while forcing him to steal propriety information from his company’s office. After a number of double-crosses and mistakes, the pair must figure out a way to work together to make something out of a bad situation.
No Sudden Move features a number of characters, from the middle man who hired the thugs (Brendan Fraser) to the accountant’s mistress (Julia Fox), to a police detective (Jon Hamm) investigating the crime, to a local gangster (Ray Liotta) neither of our protagonists trust, who will all work themselves into an important moment of the film’s overall plot.
Although the film’s final act fails to deliver a truly satisfying ending for any of the characters, the tense journey to get to the destination is worth the trip. Soderbergh gets the most out of his talented cast in a story that gets a little too complicated for its own good while trying to surprise us with how things will eventually work out. That said, there’s an awful lot here to enjoy including the performances, some nice 1950s set design, and Soderbergh’s cinematography. It’s not a classic, but No Sudden Move is a solid film about characters getting themselves into a bad situation and struggling, fighting, clawing, betraying, and killing their way to make it out alive.
