![]() ![]() ![]() Cheadle exudes a terse command as Goynes, the street survivor who has spent his life getting the short end and wants to make up for it, Del Toro plays a cutthroat player with style, and there’s a juicy performance by Brendan Fraser, looking like a heavy sluggish parody of himself and inhabiting every bit of that corpulence as a seething gang henchman. The movie is clever and blithely vicious, it keeps you guessing, and it invites you to share Soderbergh’s joy in filmmaking. “No Sudden Move” is an ambitious light-spirited high-twist modernist noir in the tradition of “Devil in a Blue Dress” and Soderbergh’s own “Out of Sight.” Soderbergh, who shot and edited the film, works with a knack for the drama of amorality: the off-kilter camera angles, the lean mean mood of hardboiled misanthropy, the relish that great actors can take in playing crumbum hoods. Goynes also has in his possession the incriminating codebook of one of the gangsters in the power chain, played with ominous cool by Bill Duke. It’s worth a ton of money (for complex crooked reasons, since it will cut into the industry’s profits), and Goynes and Russo decide to betray the gangsters who hired them by smoking out the highest bidder. They drive Wertz over to his boss’s posh Ohio home, where Wertz beats him to a pulp and retrieves the document, which turns out to be the engineering specs for a catalytic converter: the anti-pollution device that will revolutionize the auto business, though not for another decade. Goynes and Russo become partners as they realize that the document must be valuable enough to track down. “No Sudden Move” has a script, by Ed Solomon, that sprawls in several directions as it follows the improvised schemes of its characters. The old noirs were tightly structured, but everything in them played as a spontaneous eruption of passion and fate. The plot thickens all the more when it turns out that our antiheroes have been set up they aren’t scheduled to walk out of that house alive. Macy in “Fargo,” gets to his office, he discovers that the document isn’t there. (That’s how he’s supposed to get into the safe.) And when the nervous, bumbling Matt, who’s reminiscent of William H. Wearing masks that look like Ace bandages with eye holes, the three break in, and the scenes in the Wertz home have a hair-trigger excitement that evokes the 1955 Humphrey Bogart noir “The Desperate Hours.” From the start, there are complicating circumstances, as when one of the crooks reveals that Matt is having an affair with his secretary. They’re to enter the home of Matt Wertz (David Harbour), an accountant for GM, and spend a few hours holding his wife and children hostage while Matt gets taken down to his office, where he has to retrieve a mysterious document from his boss’s safe. These two freelance thugs get hired, along with the flaky scoundrel Charley (Kieran Culkin), to bring off what looks like an easy assignment. The two main characters are a natty porkpie-hatted underworld hustler, Curt Goynes ( Don Cheadle), who has an oblique messy history with some of the gangsters who’ve employed him and the disreputable baby-faced smoothie Ronald Russo ( Benicio Del Toro), who’s a racist, a backstabber, and the kind of lowlife who tempts fate in regard to the ruthless crime boss Frank Capelli (Ray Liotta) by sleeping with his wife (Julia Fox). In noir, the heroes tend to be sleazy compromised men, and on that score “No Sudden Move” doesn’t disappoint. He has also made a movie in which everyone is double-crossing everyone. logo, it’s a down-and-dirty, multi-tentacled crime thriller set in the racially polarized Detroit of 1954, and Soderbergh revels in the period trappings: the rounded cars and stylish baggy clothes, the elegant brick-based architecture, the surface ’50s “innocence” that now looks like it was designed to conceal corruption. Opening on a gorgeous vintage version of the Warner Bros. His latest, “ No Sudden Move,” makes that connection all the more explicit.
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