Soderbergh’s ‘No Sudden Move’ a middling-level neo-noir

Above : Don Cheadle and Benecio Del Toro star in Steven Soderbergh’s neo-noir “No Sudden Move.” (Photo/HBO)

Movie review : “No Sudden Move,” directed by Steven Soderbergh, starring Don Cheadle, Benicio Del Toro, David Harbour, Amy Seimetz, Ray Liotta, Julia Fox, Noah Jupe and Bill Duke. Streaming on HBO Max.

Some three decades ago, Steven Soderbergh burst onto the international filmmaking scene with a small but smart, sensitive and immaculately made black-and-white film titled “sex, lies and videotape.”

Not only did the film win the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, it earned both Soderbergh a special Cannes critics’ prize and James Spader a Best Actor award. Soderbergh’s script would even be nominated for a 1990 Original Screenplay Oscar.

It was an auspicious beginning to what has become, by anyone’s standards, a successful Hollywood career – one that has seen the versatile Soderbergh work in a number of genres, employing a range of styles. His more obscure, artistic efforts have included “Kafka,” “Schizopolis” and a 2002 version of the science fiction novel “Solaris.” His larger, glossier film include his “Ocean’s” trilogy, plus “Erin Brockovich” and the male-stripper saga “Magic Mike.”

And let’s not forget – in between his producing duties both of movies and television series – Soderbergh’s crime capers. “Out of Sight,” for example, or “The Limey.” It was his adaptation of the BBC series “Traffic” that won him a Best Director Oscar.

His latest effort, “No Sudden Move,” though, is a Soderbergh rarity: a period-piece neo-noir that has too many plots twists to be fully effective. Part of the problem stems from screenwriter Ed Solomon , who is best known for helping create a number of comic franchises, including writing the “Bill & Ted” trilogy along with the original “Men in Black” and “Charlie’s Angels” films.

“No Sudden Move,” by contrast, has not a single obvious laugh line, unless you count the few bemused asides that Benicio Del Toro delivers in his best “Usual Suspects” mutter. The year is 1954, and Del Toro teams up with Don Cheadle as a couple of Detroit gunsels who get roped into a family-extortion scheme that turns out to be far more of a backstabbing operation than either signed up for.

It’s not as if they didn’t have their suspicions. Both have run afoul of the wrong people, Del Toro’s Ronald seeming to have slept with the wife of a local mobster (played, respectively, by Julia Fox and Ray Liotta). Meanwhile, Cheadle’s Curt – just out of prison – has angered another local mob guy (played by Bill Duke). So any plan brought to them, especially involving someone they don’t know – the mysterious  middleman being a character played by an almost unrecognizable Brendan Fraser – would seem problematic.

Yet both, each for his own reasons, go along with the scheme – until it looks as if they’re going to be involved in a family massacre. From that point on, Ron and Curt partner up for mutual survival, albeit with each protecting his back as well as he can.

The McGuffin here is an engine component, one that – in real life – ended up changing the auto industry nearly as much as scientific findings did to the tobacco lobby. Here, though, the component (which I won’t identify) remains a secret, and it’s worth a lot of money to the industry for it to stay that way.

The plot that Solomon dreamed up is complex to a fault, with Ron and Curt only gradually becoming aware of the larger story – even as each follows his own secret plan. Most of the enjoyment of watching “No Sudden Move” comes from witnessing how well the cast members portray their individual characters.

Del Toro, who won a Best Supporting Oscar for “Traffic,” makes Ron into a guy with more ambition than brains. Cheadle’s Curt has his limitations, too, though he is the only one who seems to have some sense of morality – which in classic noir studies isn’t always reliable insurance.

Liotta brings his usual bad-boy energy to the project, while Duke simmers with suppressed rage tempered by his own feel for what is fair play. More emotionally involving is the threatened family – with dad played by David Harbour (starring now in “Black Widow” ), mom played by Amy Seimetz and son played by Noah Jupe of the two “A Quiet Place” films.

Speaking of Seimetz, she along with Fox and a secretary character played Frankie Shaw, are basic female types out of 1950s cinema. Two are devious femme fatales, and the third is long-suffering – though all, in the end, finally act in their own interests instead of just being mere victims.

It’s the larger subtext of “No Sudden Move” that feels muddled, despite Soderbergh’s talent for pulling us along such a twisted plot path. Matt Damon shows up near the end to deliver a speech that spells out an overt message about caste and capitalism.

But his words seem both too obvious and too little at once to give Soderbergh’s film the final, poignant punctuation that would lift it from a middling study to something truly memorable.

An edited version of this review was previously broadcast on Spokane Public Radio.