Steven Soderbergh is back, baby!

The acclaimed American director has returned to feature film with Logan Lucky, a NASCAR heist-comedy starring Channing Tatum, Adam Driver, Riley Keogh and Daniel Craig (cheekily ‘introduced’ in the credits and marketing material). Soderbergh’s retirement was short-lived — his last film was 2013’s Behind the Candelabra — and, let’s be real, no one expected it to last (see also: Jay-Z, Studio Ghibli’s Hayao Miyazaki, LCD Soundsystem, Jay-Z again, etc etc).

Whether or not you know Soderbergh’s name, you’ve almost certainly seen some of his films — and you’ll recognise them here. The most obvious reference point is the director’s 2001 remake of Ocean’s Eleven, given that this is a heist film.

That’s apparently what drew Soderbergh to the project too. Chatting to Entertainment Weekly, he described Logan Lucky as “an anti-glam version of an Ocean’s movie. Nobody dresses nice. Nobody has nice stuff. They have no money”. There’s even an offhand reference to the modern classic in the dialogue, with someone describing the heist as “Ocean’s 7-11”. So how does it stack up against the legacy?

Continue reading at Junkee.