A few small-time criminals—freelancers, if you will—get what seems to be a good gig from the organized crime bosses. Except, it turns out the gig is not so good. How, then, does this den of thieves navigate the terrain of big money backstabbing to get what’s theirs? In Steven Soderbergh‘s latest movie for Warner Media/HBOMax, No Sudden Move, men and women jockey for their place in the pecking order of American wealth and status in the 1950s. But the jockeying is futile in some cases, of course: Whoever’s not at the top already knows they’re probably not going to get there.
Soderbergh, working as he often does with casting director Carmen Cuba, has assembled a top tier cast of character actors with a sprinkling of previous blockbuster stars. Soderbergh regular Don Cheadle and Traffic alum Benicio Del Toro head up the cast as two Detroit hoods who get in over their heads. Del Toro plays a cryptic Italian lowlife, Richard Russo; Cheadle is overambitious aging fuck-up Curt Goynes. Goynes and Russo know and fear a lot of the same people, but they’re fundamentally opposed. That they have to make a team is an insult to Russo, who’s an overt racist, suspicious of Black people’s greediness, as he calls it. Goynes, though, is less focused on Russo’s character and more attentive to his own possible gains; he has accounts to settle.
Here’s where the others come in. She Dies Tomorrow filmmaker Amy Seimetz, who wrote and directed the first season of the Soderbergh-produced series The Girlfriend Experience, plays depressed and slightly unruly housewife Mary Wertz; the beloved Stranger Things actor David Harbour is her emotionally absent husband, Matt. HBO kid regular Noah Jupe is their over-curious moody teen, Matthew. The three of them, plus a sweet kid sister, find themselves in the middle of Goynes and Russos’ job. Thrillingly, Brendan Fraser makes a long-overdue return to screen as organized crime middle-manager Doug Jones, who won’t give any specifics about what he’s recruited Russo and Goynes to do along with a guy simply called Charley, played by Succession stand-out Kieran Culkin. Julia Fox and Ray Liotta play a married couple, and that’s all I’ll say about that. The parade of characters goes on and on. You definitely won’t want to miss national treasure Bill Duke in his element.
What’s incredible is that every one of these actors, and more, are given something worthwhile to do in the film. Mosaic writer Ed Solomon has teamed back up with Soderbergh to make a fairly grim and social-studies-heavy take on the organized crime heist film sing on screen. There are gags and gun shots, often combined; biting turns of phrase delivered with charm (“Is that what I think it is?” “It depends on what you think it is”). With Soderbergh and his collaborators, you can never complain that great thespian skills were left to wander, or that you were bored. I’m not sure that I ever really knew what was going on in *No Sudden Move*—something about redlining, pollution, and the American auto industry—but I was never taken out of the moment. Each beat pulsed with both anticipation and absurdity. If that’s not movie magic, then, well, it depends on what you think movie magic is.
Matt Damon makes a cameo as the kind of powerful white boss who is so confident as to explain to you why you’ll never touch him, even when you think you’ve got a good shot. John Hamm puts in his regular hours as suave cop who just needs to get to the bottom of this one, kid. The characters are types, and their storylines are tropes, but in No Sudden Move the familiar is not merely cursory but instructive. Pay attention, the film seems to say. Look at these people more closely than you would otherwise. In moments, the camera takes on a kind of Othered gaze, dialed to 1950s Detroit. How are Black people, Italians, and housewives in this city sizing up their surroundings; what do they think they can get and how do they think they’re going to get it? As the auto industry poisons residents and buys up land where Black families have managed to purchase homes, how will various oppositions stake their claims? No Sudden Move asks the question in several ways. Neither Goynes nor Russo have answers, but they’ve got plans.
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