Whether he has to shoot through Covid (winked at by one hoodlum’s line about taking off his bandit mask because it makes his face itchy) or shack up with streaming giants uninterested in theatrical releasing, he always makes it work. His most valuable skill seems to be in affecting the guise of commercial appeal to get his idiosyncratic, heady passion projects made. It’s all part of the game that Soderbergh has mastered this deep into a prolific and storied career, in which the objective is the appropriation of corporate funds for scathingly critical yet casually enjoyable anti-corporate art. The overstuffed, better-keep-up narrative suits the film’s purposes, occupying audience attentions to leave them unprepared for the nimble writing’s assorted baits and switches. In their later scenes, heist films will often lead their characters to the realization that This Goes All the Way to the Top Soderbergh and Solomon instead assert that we don’t even really know where the top is, and that we can scarcely conceive of the power and sheer enormity of influence wielded at the top.Īs the simple task of retrieving the mystery papers goes south, the nearly two-hour runtime condenses more plotting and diversion into the sequence of events, the best of it following a pair of irate mistresses (Julia Fox, verifying herself as no fluke following her Uncut Gems breakout, and Frankie Shaw). In this case, the precise nature of that manila envelope’s contents will be revealed, and with its revelation, the scope of the affair expands to proportions greater than these criminals and the pair of gangster bosses (the great Bill Duke representing the city’s Black contingent, Ray Liotta standing in for the Italians) after them.
They’ve come to compel him to steal some MacGuffin-type document, a vagary that a lesser film would allow to sit, its purpose of advancing the plot served.
Film no sudden move full#
That delicate operation centers on crooks Curt (Don Cheadle), Ronald (Benicio del Toro) and Charley (Kieran Culkin) busting into the home of company man Matt (David Harbour, not just at his funniest but right at home in a cast full of men with beef-fed mid-century character-actor looks) to hold his family at gunpoint. Screenwriter Ed Solomon doesn’t overplay his hand while establishing this much, allowing its connection to the caper at hand to arise when the time is right. At any rate, he unobtrusively conveys the sociocultural context the average viewer will need: the Motor City is being carved up like a pie by the automotive giants at Ford, GM and Chrysler, leaving the human beings who have long occupied the area scrambling to hold on to the few rights they’ve got left. We’re whisked back to this period via rumpled vintage suits, the occasional bebop idiom dotting the dialogue, and a border-warping fisheye lens evoking a nostalgic past that may be more in Soderbergh’s imagination than cinema history.
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