Hank Hill's Eleven
Jimmy Logan is a blue collar worker, who just lost his job, repairing tunnels under the Charlotte Motor Speedway, due to an unreported injury that ended his once promising football career. Before he was let go, he discovered underground tubes that transport all of the venues cash to a secured vault. To help support himself and continue to see his daughter from a previous marriage, he decides to rob the speedway.
Lucky for Jimmy, he and his brother, Clyde, a veteran that lost his arm in the war, have a history of crime together. Jimmy’s plan is to take advantage of the construction site under the speedway and his new-found knowledge of the money tubes, to rob them. With the help of his brother, their motorhead sister, a convicted safe cracker and his brothers, they’re about to attempt the biggest heist that their town has ever seen.
I was a big fan of Soderbergh’s work with the Ocean’s movies, so I was excited to see another intricate heist movie. I was pleasantly surprised to see how a ragtag team of hillbillies pulled off a huge plan like this. Soderbergh was able to present us with tons of smart concepts, while having fun along the way.
***Warning: Spoilers***
My favorite thing that they did, was how each step of the plan was presented to us as an audience. Whenever something would happen, we would be left out of knowing what something is for, to learn how it is used later. Whether it’s building wooden boxes, watching a long take of Daniel Craig drinking from a sink, or painting cockroaches, when we see how they’re implemented, it’s fun and smart. Even when Craig’s character throws random stuff in a bag, he takes the time to explain to us what it’s used for.
The cast looked like they had fun with the piece. Dropping a couple of pop culture nods like Game of Thrones and even Soderbergh’s Ocean’s movies. I wasn’t surprised by Tatum and Driver’s Hillbilly personas, but seeing Craig do it was fun.
Although I mentioned that the heist was smart, the story did have a few problems. I wondered why Tatum’s character was motivated to rob the speedway in the first place. He lost his job and picked a fight with a famous racer that was insulting his brother, other than that, couldn’t he have just gotten another job, instead of turning back to crime? After we get the big life-changing revelation and having his character deciding to turn the money over, we get another sequence showing a secret plan between the Logans, showing that they ended up taking a separate stash of the money. I thought that maybe he did this to exclude the Bang siblings, but I guess they were still included. I think this also lead to a storyline about how the speedway got involved with insurance fraud? And this also leads to a whole other story involving the FBI, I didn’t even get to mention the throw-away love subplot.
After the heist, I thought the movie could have ended, but there was the whole thing involving Hilary Swank as an FBI agent. When we feel like it was revolved, she ends up undercover among the crew at the end. Does this mean that there is a sequel or universe being made? Hopefully so, because if not, there were too many ignored storylines in this film if it were a standalone film.
This was a fun film, but the confusing story plots held it back. Hopefully that leads it to more films, to help wrap it up better. If you were a fan of the Ocean’s movies, this is a great addition, but it’s got big shoes to fill if they do go further with it. This one is worth checking out.