As No Sudden Move begins, Curt (Don Cheadle) walks down a run-down Detroit street into a barbershop and through a backdoor into an illicit bar where he meets a fixer who’s got a deal for him. Just released from prison, Curt is tempted by an easy three-hour job for “a reliable guy to do some work.” Turns out it’s a job for three guys, and the other two, Ronald (Benicio del Toro) and Charley (Kieran Culkin), prove to be anything but reliable.
Steven Soderbergh’s stylishly crafted new film for HBO Max is set in 1954 and ties some of that era’s troubles to problems that persist today. The messages about race and redlining, the “urban renewal” destruction of vital communities, the anti-Semitism, are encompassed by a hardboiled crime story told in the best neo-noir tradition. Soderbergh’s ambitions have sometimes exceeded his abilities but with No Sudden Move, he gets everything just about right, askew camera angles and all. The complicated criminal scheme goes off track at every turn—it’s not an easy job after all—and through the series of meetings with shadowy figures in dimly lit rooms it becomes clear that everyone is screwing everyone else (in more ways than one).
Curt and Ronald are tasked with holding a family at gunpoint. Charley forces their accountant dad, Matt (David Harbour), to drive to his office and steal a document from his boss’ safe. The safe is empty and when he becomes clear that Charley is about to kill Matt and the family, Curt shoots Charley down.
Charley’s death doesn’t end the pursuit of that secret document—the blueprint for a catalytic convertor the auto industry wants to suppress but is valuable to organized crime for leverage and blackmail. To say the story grows chaotic is almost an understatement, yet Soderbergh wraps it nicely in just under two hours.
Cheadle fills Curt’s ragged-edged, emaciated frame with mingled regret and determination. Like everyone in No Sudden Move, he’s after money but unlike the rest, he wants to redress a specific, somewhat mysterious injustice. “I’m going to get what’s mine,” he insists, not a million dollars or pie in the sky, but exactly what he’s owed.
Looking at the world through wary, hooded eyes, del Toro’s Ronald doesn’t much like Curt. His racism is so engrained that he brushes off the car seat where Curt had sat before he sits down. Curt and Ronald become the film’s focus and their unanticipated partnership in crime has one weakness: after an initial unpleasant exchange, the racial animosity is dropped. In 1954, it wasn’t so easy to pretend that race doesn’t matter. One other occasional weakness are moments of dialogue that sound more 2020s than 1950s (“We’re good. Seriously?”).
The story’s velocity and the ace characterizations by all players push aside those objections. The big Detroit cars that fill the street gleam like they just rolled off their assembly lines and the period visuals are down pat. No Sudden Move depicts a society lubricated by cocktails, hooked on cigarettes and deeply corrupt. Husbands and wives cheat on each other, gangland bosses cross each other and the scent of dirty money extends into the ranks of law enforcement and the executive suites of corporate America.
Power and violence flow from the pursuit of money and money depends on power and violence. Sitting comfortably above the carnage is a suave financier, Lowen (Matt Damon), who gives Curt and Ronald a short lecture on social reality. He insists that there is no conclusive evidence that automobiles contribute to air pollution and as for the “urban renewal” that will soon destroy Curt’s neighborhood, “the country is re-landscaping itself.” One moment Lowen denies complicity—he didn’t make the river, he’s just paddling with the current—and in the next he insists that he and his caste are the rule makers. “Even when you think you have autonomy, it’s an illusion,” he says.
Whether denying the value of catalytic convertors in the ‘50s or climate change in the ‘00s, or the unresolved tensions of American history, monied interests have profited from falsehoods by pretending that problems don’t exist. And those interests are hard to fight. As Lowen says, money for him is like a lizard’s tail—cut it off and it grows back.
