For everyone who watched Ocean’s Eleven and thought…oh that’s just too exciting, well, the director of it has come up with something for you. The very title of No Sudden Move implies a slow and steady pace. All the nicer to fall asleep to.
Soderbergh is usually very good and occasionally flat out great. This gorgeously shot sleepy dud of a thriller is certainly an exception. The goal in this testosterone driven feature seems to be to employ every good actor in Tinseltown who hasn’t aged well. It’s a strange goal, but there it is. And so it begins with the suddenly old looking War Machine strutting his way through 1954 Detroit on the way to meet a suddenly huge looking George of the Jungle. The latter is actually a freaking tragedy of a WTF, my easily favorite actor of the 90s, he didn’t just cut a perfect 10 while clumsily swinging through the jungle, he also fought mummies, swing danced and had fun with animation in the most entertaining fashion. And then all but vanished from the screen. I read a long interview some time ago where he confessed to having many problems, physical and psychological, as a result of all that fame, but was making a comeback and I was so excited for it. And sure, he’s portly in Doom Patrol, but here, he’s positively enormous. Not quite sure what he’s been doing with himself in the intervening years, but to all appearances it looks like he’s just been eating. The weird thing is his face still looks youthful, in fact he looks like a thing that ate the actor and held on to the face for appearances. Which is to say he makes another famously middle age spread Benecio Del Toro look positively svelte. So anyway, Rick O'Connell hires Del Toro, War Machine and one of the Culkins (who is just much too young and small in stature to register in this movie) for a simple and well paying gig of babysitting a family while Stranger Things sheriff (the guy who actually may have dropped some gut for that lamentable recent abomination of a remake of Mike Mignola’s genius creation) goes to his office and to the secretary he’s been screwing to retrieve some very important document. Of course, of course, the gig goes sideways and results in all sorts of murderous complications and more famously handsome actors in their 40s strutting through the plot. The women in this movie are barely present, you can tell buy the no name actresses, nowhere near on the same fame train car. The plot, convoluted as it is, involved car industry and in fact does significantly tie in as the ending will tell you, if you care enough to stick around. It’s appropriate enough, because the entire movie looks like a really awesome classic car show (another mostly men of a certain age and, weirdly, this reviewer’s, favorite) but outside of that it was literally a struggle to stay awake though this thoroughly unthrilling wrinkled scrotum of a thriller. And yes, it’s a sort of thing critics love, it’s well acted, well scripted, the cinematography is lovely, but as a cohesive total it fails to either entertain, delight of emotionally engage. It’s clever for its own sake, smugly so, but that’s no great joy. Overall, probably a decent dad movie, something to make overweight out of shape middle age crisis candidates seem hip, if only to themselves. Otherwise…pass. So I've been thinking and thinking and trying to come up with any actresses who hit the middle age the heavy side up and managed to maintain a career and I've come up with nothing, zero, zilch, nada. There aren't that many heavy actresses to begin with (and they are the ones usually heavy from the get go), but every single popular one in her 40s or 50s has essentially maintained her body if she wanted to maintain a body of work. Some merely well preserved as if by magic like Michelle Pfeiffer, some freakishly unnaturally so, like (somebody feed) Nicole Kidman. So there's an ugly double standard at play here that seems to completely ignore all the progress of the gender equality battles. So there, you thought this review was being fattist or misandrist, but it's actually feminist. Boom. Assumptions confounded.
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