No Sudden Move (2021)

Steven Soderbergh is reliable. Around 2011 he made a movie called Haywire, a relatively simple spy action thriller centered around MMA star Gina Carano, and during the publicity of that movie Soderbergh waged war on the "shaky camera" aesthetic or style that had permeated hollywood action movies since the berth of Jason Bourne. He talked about how he always wanted the viewer to know where they are during the course of a movie - have a good sense of space, maintain the 180 degree lines etc. - especially during a chaotic fight sequence. I remember watching Haywire and feeling disoriented because every action movie for years had been so shaky, and this movie's action had an almost defiant clarity. Shots were often static, and the action progressed through cuts and editing in a way that actually - at the time - made the movie feel old. But as Hollywood has moved away from nauseating handheld cameras back towards conventional ways of shooting action, this movie is actually aging better than Paul Greengrass and his seemingly endless string of subsidiary action movies have. But Soderbergh has always been very deliberate in his use of space and communicating to the audience what's happening, or disguising it in some cases. His use of Las Vegas casino rooms and their maze of behind-the-curtain vaults and surveillance rooms mis-leads the audience (and some characters) throughout the entire plot of Ocean's 11. Soderbergh even arguably pioneered the handheld camera in 2000's Traffic; but go back and watch that movie to see how the viewer is only disoriented at specific drug-haze moments. The rest of the time space is intentionally and carefully identified and realized for the audience.

So now we have No Sudden Move, a tight little neo-noir crime thriller with a ton of familiar faces and a generic genre plot line. Existing somewhere in the mafia/crime spectrum, and based in Detroit in the 50s, the What and Why end up mattering basically not at all. The film tags an expository conclusion at the end to give the viewer real-world context, an unnecessary addition to an otherwise efficient film. But where the film shines is in its execution, and Soderbergh once again uses space supremely. A key sequence in a restaurant that devolves into a shootout utilizes wide-screen anamorphic lenses in a way to make the space feel claustrophobic without sacrificing the presence of each character. 

This is a movie full of A-listers eating up scenes like cake, and Soderbergh all the way in his bag. My only wish, as stated, is that he had resisted the urge to tack on contextual clarification at the end, sacrificing an item central to the movie's action - that is merely a maguffin anyway - to make it The Reason this story is told. 

This movie was a COVID19 casualty, released in July 2021 and went straight to streaming on HBO.