What is it about?

Logan Lucky is about Jimmy Logan (Channing Tatum), who gets fired from his job and recruits his brother Clyde (Adam Driver), his sister Mellie (Riley Keough), and incarcerated explosives expert Joe Bang (Daniel Craig) to pull off a heist during a NASCAR race.

How is it? 7.5/10

Logan Lucky is a funny, entertaining time at the movies that boasts both stunning cinematography and great performances. However, it struggles with pacing issues and runs too long near the end.

The Ups

The cast in this movie, overall, does great, but Channing Tatum and Daniel Craig stand out in particular. Tatum is very convincing with his role, and does well with it, wringing out lots of laughs. Daniel Craig is hilarious here and gives an awesome, super entertaining performance. He has one of the most interesting characters in the movie and is a delight to watch in every scene he’s in.

The film also succeeds on a technical aspect. There’s lots of gorgeous cinematography throughout, the editing is never choppy, and the transitions are unique and fun to watch. Director Steven Soderbergh, who also made Ocean’s Eleven, did a great job directing this film. He made the movie pleasantly ridiculous, hilarious, and compelling seemingly effortlessly. The tone here is fantastic: the movie is never heavy-handed and is always light and funny.

Although the humor drops a bit in the middle, it’s quite present throughout and lands most of the time. There are some very clever, hysterical gags lodged in Logan Lucky that’ll have you laughing out loud. Despite the film being (for the most part) a comedy, it does have emotional buildup and an eventual payoff near the end. The emotional moments are handled well, however, and are never sappy or overdone.

The Downs

The first issue with Logan Lucky is its pacing. The film drags quite a bit throughout its runtime. In its first and second acts, it focuses too much on smaller, sometimes inconsequential scenes or details that derail the pacing and just drag the movie along. In the third act, after the heist sequence is over, the movie goes on for way too long, and doesn’t know when to  wrap up. It could have benefitted greatly from trimming to end by about 15 or 20 minutes.

The second main issue is its plot. The main heist storyline gets a little too convoluted at times. It relies on too many loose plot threads to work, and it gets hard to keep track of all of them. Some of these don’t even make sense until the end. This makes the film not only confusing to watch, but also overly complex. Also, there’s not much motivation for the characters to go through with the heist. There’s no one to really root against, and the audience isn’t too concerned about whether or not the characters pull off the heist. Besides Channing Tatum being fired from his job, there is no reason to care about the outcome of the heist.

Overall, Logan Lucky is a fun, often hilarious movie that will entertain you for a solid two hours. It has great performances, with Daniel Craig as a standout, spectacular direction and cinematography from Steven Soderbergh, and a good emotional payoff. However, it suffers from too long of a run time, pacing issues throughout, and an overly convoluted plot.