Steven Soderbergh never misses, but the Ocean’s Eleven director has rarely been as dead-on accurate as he is in his underappreciated 2017 comedy Logan Lucky, which is now streaming on Netflix. Sure, Logan Lucky is a highly entertaining heist movie, but its best feature is the comedy, which has aged like fine wine. Just about every joke and decision in the movie has gotten better with age, including a Game of Thrones bit that’s easily one of the funniest scenes of the 2010s.
The movie stars a pair of redneck (complimentary) brothers played by Channing Tatum and Adam Driver. This is the first of Soderbergh’s moments of genius in Logan Lucky. Everyone knows Tatum can do comedy — it’s been his primary lane since 21 Jump Street — but Logan Lucky is still the only time in Driver’s career that he’s been given straight comedy (as opposed to dramedy) from a script that lives up to his tremendous talents.
Everything Driver does and says in this movie is hilarious. His slow, drawling accent gives him space to extend even the shortest words into their own sentences, stringing each syllable together in a way that can’t help but earn laughs. Every ounce of the performance is pure genius, and the fact that Soderbergh is the only filmmaker who’s managed to recognize Driver’s comedic talents is as much a compliment to him as a director as it is a damn shame for all of us.
Most of the plot revolves around the brothers’ attempt to pull off a heist at Charlotte Motor Speedway, which requires delicate timing, a complicated prison escape, a little misdirection, and, of course, the perfect team for the job.
Of course, Driver isn’t the only movie star that Soderbergh recognized might be able to have a little fun playing a character from the South. Two years before Rian Johnson gave him the starring detective role in Knives Out, Daniel Craig played Joe Bang in Logan Lucky, a temperamental demolitions expert with a knack for explosives and a voice like Foghorn Leghorn. Watching it now, you’d practically believe this could be a Knives Out spinoff with Benoit Blanc running an undercover investigation using the most ridiculous disguise you could imagine, but instead it’s just another example of Soderbergh recognizing comedic greatness a few years ahead of everyone else.
All of these elements culminate in an absolute showstopper scene during a staged prison riot, where the prisoners present their demands to the warden and his staff after locking themselves in the security office. Among the prisoners’ demands is that the warden buy them a copy of George R.R. Martin’s The Winds of Winter. When the warden says he can’t meet that particular demand, pandemonium ensues as the prisoners simply cannot believe that Martin wouldn’t have delivered his book within the time frame he originally promised his publishers.
It’s a long, winding diversion that has almost nothing to do with the movie, but is nonetheless hysterical. And like everything else in the movie, it’s a joke that only gets better with age. Perhaps, hopefully, one day it will feel like a reminder of what the long wait for the next A Song of Ice and Fire book felt like, but for now, over 13 years since the release of A Dance with Dragons, it’s the kind of joke that’s held on to its punchline for so long that it’s come back around to feeling even more hilarious than originally intended. After all, the inmates are right; the then-six-year wait for The Winds of Winter was ridiculous back in 2017. But just imagine how they’d feel now, after more than twice as long a wait?
Thankfully, while we’re still waiting for The Winds of Winter — and probably long after it’s been released, if that ever happens — you can always just give Logan Lucky a watch to remind yourself what it’s like to be ahead of the curve rather than way, way behind it.
