Logan Lucky movie review & film summary (2017)

The story centers on two brothers, both wounded war veterans. Jimmy Logan (Channing Tatum), a onetime coal miner, lost a leg in the service. Jimmy’s younger brother Clyde (Adam Driver) lost part of an arm, and now tends bar at a roadside saloon where Jimmy is a regular. An obnoxious customer jokes that if you put the Logan boys together, you’d get a whole person. That's not too far off the mark: like redneck cousins of George Clooney and Brad Pitt's characters in the "Ocean's" movies, they amplify each other's better qualities, and maintain a united front even when they disagree. Legend has it that the Logan family, which also includes a badass, hot-car-driving kid sister named Mellie (Riley Keough), is cursed. Throughout "Logan Lucky," you keep wondering if the curse will rear its head and ruin the plan Jimmy has cooked up with Clyde and a third partner, an imprisoned explosives expert named Joe Bang (Daniel Craig) who's five months away from release.

It’s a heck of a scheme. Seems the Charlotte Motor Speedway has a sinkhole problem, and Jimmy was part of the team of ex-coal miners brought in to fix it. While toiling beneath the stadium, he learned that concession stand earnings are delivered to a cash vault deep in the basement by way of pneumatic tubes. The Logans promise that with a little help from Joe they can break into the vault, steal the cash, and walk away rich. Joe says he’d be happy to join the team if he weren’t, as he sneers, "In...CAR...cer...a...TED." No biggie. The Logan boys offer to bust Joe out of prison long enough to join the heist, then sneak him back in.

At this point you may start to wonder how smart the Logans actually are and how seriously we're supposed to take their boasting. There are two kinds of people who make promises like the ones the Logans make to Joe Bang: hotshots and idiots. The characters in this film are drawn with broad enough strokes that they could go either way. The Logans and the Bangs—including Joe's younger brothers, Sam and Fish (Brian Gleeson and Jack Quaid), one of whom claims to be a computer expert who knows "all the Twitters"—are a loquacious bunch of misfits and scalawags, nervy as hell. But sometimes they sound like characters from one of those Coen brothers movies filled with dimwitted braggarts—think "Raising Arizona" or "O Brother, Where Art Thou?"—and each one has a different accent. Driver sounds like Forrest Gump eating peanut butter, Craig has the barbecued hambone drawl of a sheriff from a 1970s hicksploitation picture, and there are times when Tatum seems to forget to have one. Only Keough, the granddaughter of Elvis Presley, seems as rooted in life as the screenplay's references to NASCAR fandom, the child beauty pageant circuit, contaminated groundwater, and the fall of the mining industry.

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