In the opening moments of No Sudden Move a steely-eyed, fedora-clad Don Cheadle strides through a declining corner of 1950s Detroit to the accompaniment of a David Holmes score dominated by congas and an ominous guitar line. Cheadle looks like a man determined to take care of business, even if that business is bound to take him to some pretty shady places. Though photo flashes of the neighborhood in more thriving times hint at themes the film will tease out later, it’s clear that the latest from Steven Soderbergh will return him to the world of crime movies. Even the font used in the titles recalls yellowing paperbacks and film noir posters. It’s familiar territory for the director, but one he’s never arrived at by the same route twice.
No Sudden Move is Soderbergh’s 33rd feature as a director. (He’ll likely have released his 34th, at least, before the year ends.) That’s not counting the two seasons Soderbergh spent directing every episode of the Cinemax series The Knick, various other TV series, or projects like Magic Mike XXL for which he served as editor and director of photography (as he has for almost every project he’s directed this century). Soderbergh’s is a daunting filmography, the sort whose sheer volume makes it hard to put your arms around. Between the years 2004 and 2006 alone, the director bounced from the slick, star-packed Ocean’s 12 to the heavily improvised, star-free digital experiment Bubble to The Good German, a pastiche of ’40s studio filmmaking. Some of Soderbergh’s directorial signatures run through each (even The Good German, in spite of his attempt to disappear into another style) but it’s hard to find other sorts of connections beyond a restless desire to experiment.
But boil away some titles — a lot of titles, admittedly — and a different sort of filmography emerges, that of a director with a deep interest in crime movies and a desire to shape familiar genre material into new, often pointed, forms. His attempts stretch from almost all the way back to the beginnings of his career in the ‘90s through the present. In fact, it has roots in one of his earliest missteps, the 1995 film The Underneath, which played a handful of theaters, briefly, before largely disappearing from the world. (Even now, it’s not available on any streaming service, though it has received a couple of releases on DVD and Blu-ray.)
Soderbergh has referred to it as “dead on arrival” and described it as a kind of “bottoming out.” “I was so unhappy coming out of it,” he told an interviewer for the Criterion Collection in 2013, “that I decided I needed to radically alter my way of working.”
An adaptation of the Don Tracy novel Criss Cross, The Underneath stars Peter Gallagher as an off-shore oil worker who returns to his Texas hometown to attend his mother’s second wedding. Though he’s settled the out-of-control gambling debts that forced him to leave town in the first place, he hasn’t squared the books with Rachel (Allison Elliott), the girlfriend he left behind who’s subsequently taken up with Tommy (William Fichtner), a local club owner/sleazebag.
Though filled with strong performances and devices Soderbergh would borrow from for years—from its boldly filtered lighting scheme to its chronology-breaking storytelling—The Underneath is terminally inert. It doesn’t approach other ’90s neo-noir efforts like Carl Franklin’s One False Move or John Dahl’s Red Rock West.
But The Underneath is key to understanding the Soderbergh crime films that followed, which often play like attempts to correct its mistakes. Soderbergh immediately followed it with the low-budget experimental comedy Schizopolis, a send-up of human existence itself starring Soderbergh and his ex-wife, Betsy Brantley. But his next move was to make a crime movie. Then another. Then to return to crime stories with a frequency he’d never find for another genre. (Sorry science fiction and sprawling historical biopics—you only get Solaris and Che, both of which are underrated, by the way.)
Released in 1996, Out of Sight crackles with all the confidence missing from The Underneath. Sandwiched between Jackie Brown and Get Shorty, it was part of a small burst of films that finally cracked the code of adapting Elmore Leonard’s crime fiction, namely by keeping Leonard’s dialogue and surrounding it with stylish filmmaking of the director’s choice. For Soderbergh that meant borrowing heavily (but respectfully) from innovative ’60s and early ’70s forbears — a bit of John Boorman’s Point Blank, some editing tricks from Richard Lester, and a lot of Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now for the famous love scene — and reshaping them to serve the film he wanted to make.
Three years later he returned with The Limey, an exploration of similar themes and influences that plays like Out of Sight’s darker, minor-key (and in some ways even better) B-side. Though a tonal 180 from Out of Sight, The Limey still suggested the director had drawn up a blueprint of what a Soderbergh crime movie looked like, one he could pull out and apply elsewhere any time he liked.
Then he threw it away. Ocean’s Eleven keeps some of Out of Sight’s cool surfaces and retains the services of its charming leading man, George Clooney, but applies them to a breezy, snappily edited heist movie designed to entertain at every moment while letting co-stars like Matt Damon, Brad Pitt, and Julia Roberts remind viewers what made them stars in the first place. Its first sequel, 2004’s Ocean’s 12, pushed the envelope of that approach, as if trying to figure out how much experimentation and meta touches a studio blockbuster could contain. Perhaps a bit chastened by the response, Steven Soderbergh concluded the series in 2007 with the fun, if familiar, Ocean’s Thirteen.
By 2009 he was experimenting again with The Informant!, a true story of white collar crime starring Matt Damon as Mark Whitacre, an unstable corporate whistleblower with secrets of his own. Bringing in an aggressively zippy Marvin Hamlisch score and filling out the cast with comedic actors like Joel McHale, Tony Hale, Patton Oswalt, and Paul F. Tompkins, The Informant! plays as a farcical crime comedy without losing any of the facts of the case, or the scary intensity of Whitacre’s ongoing meltdown. The result is a movie that’s ultimately as upsetting as it is funny. In 2017’s Logan Lucky, Soderbergh’s first film after a short-lived retirement, he kept The Informant!’s lightness but lost the irony with a fun, down-market twist on the heist movie in which a family of West Virginians attempt to rob a NASCAR speedway.
Soderbergh has never made the same sort of crime movie twice. The Ocean’s films work as a matched set and Out of Sight and The Limey complement each other in many respects, but each have their own distinctive feel and each plays with the genre in different ways. No Sudden Move is no exception. Cheadle and Benicio del Toro star as, respectively, Curt Goynes and Ronald Russo, a pair of criminals reluctantly partnered for that they’re told will be a simple “babysitting” job: holding hostage the family of Matt Wertz (David Harbour), a mid-level auto industry executive, while Wertz retrieves a document of great if mysterious importance. Scripted by Ed Solomon (best known for Men in Black and the Bill & Ted trilogy), the film then spins off in several labyrinthine directions at once, all destined to converge in the finale.
Though set in Detroit, the film looks nothing like Out of Sight. In fact, it seems designed to disorient viewers in several ways, using lenses that distort the edge of the frame and making familiar faces look unfamiliar. (Cheadle sports a mustache and a shaved-back hairline and speaks in a smoker’s rasp. Del Toro wears a swooping pompadour. Harbour is beardless and bespectacled. It might take a second or two to recognize the big star who makes an uncredited late-film cameo.) Rather than the crisp editing of his previous journey to Detroit, Soderbergh emphasizes immediate tension and a sense of mounting danger. Rather than putting a gloss on the murk of the criminal world, it plunges into the thick of it.
It’s a nasty, effective thriller. It also doubles as a key to understanding why Soderbergh keeps gravitating back to crime stories. As Goynes and Russo work their way up the criminal chain, they find themselves wading into the ostensibly respectable corporate world only to find there’s little difference between the two. There are haves and have-nots and the former will do everything they can to avoid becoming the latter, no matter who they have to sacrifice along the way. And there’s always a justification for bad behavior, whether it’s Goynes drawing a gone-straight associate back into a life of crime by offering him more money in one night than he could make in several years at his $11-a-day bellboy job, or the linguistic fig leaves and everybody’s-doing-it mentality that justifies the steamrolling of Detroit’s Black neighborhoods. “The country is re-landscaping itself,” Goynes is told. “I hate to break it to you, but this is happening everywhere. One hundred cities and counting.”
Looping back to those opening credits, it’s clear No Sudden Move is telling two sorts of related crime stories at once: the story of Goynes as he heads to his next dirty job and the story of what happened to the crumbling community around him. It’s not the first time Soderbergh has used crime fiction as a stage for a story about conflicts between the powerful and the powerless. It’s what drives the moment when George Clooney’s Jack Foley tears off his tie in frustration after being rejected by the straight world in Out of Sight. It’s Danny Ocean recruiting a team of crooks to undo a bigger crook. It’s the bigger story of The Informant!, in which one man’s journey through corporate corruption reveals the ways criminal acts hide in plain sight all around us.
Soderbergh keeps finding new approaches to the crime movie, and new ways to pay homage to the past while offering tricks and moments for subsequent filmmakers to draw upon. But his crime stories all have one element in common: the quiet, insistent repetition that we might choose to visit his crime-ridden worlds, but when the movies end we’re still stuck with the one in which we live.