115 min | R | July 1, 2021 | Warner Bros. Pictures
Detroit, 1954. A career criminal takes a simple babysitting job that turns into a heist, and the heist turns into a death sentence. Everybody is double-crossing everybody, and the real thieves never get their hands dirty.
Detroit in 1954 runs on cars, cash, and the people who get crushed between them. Curtis Goynes is a small-time criminal fresh out of prison who takes a job that sounds simple. Babysit a family while a mid-level executive is forced to retrieve a document from his employer’s safe. The job goes wrong inside the first hour, and the document turns out to be worth killing for. No Sudden Move is a heist film on the surface and a story about the auto industry poisoning a city underneath.
Don Cheadle plays Curt as a man doing arithmetic in every scene. He calculates angles, reads rooms, and trusts no one because trust has never paid him. Benicio del Toro plays Ronald Russo with a slippery charm that masks a man already planning his own double cross. David Harbour plays Matt Wertz as a sweating middle manager who is in over his head and knows it. Jon Hamm plays Detective Joe Finney with bureaucratic menace, and Ray Liotta brings real danger to crime boss Frank Capelli. Brendan Fraser turns up as the heavy who hires everyone and lies to all of them.
Steven Soderbergh directs from a script by Ed Solomon, and he shoots the film himself under his usual pseudonym. He uses wide-angle anamorphic lenses that bend the edges of every frame. Faces stretch and rooms warp at the corners, so the period Detroit looks subtly diseased. The distortion turns straight lines into something queasy and unstable. The visual scheme tells you the whole world is crooked before any character says it out loud.
Solomon’s plot folds back on itself so many times that following it requires work. The double crosses stack until the only honest position is paranoia. That density is the point. The film argues that the men with the real power never enter the frame, and the people fighting over the document are fighting over scraps the executives already wrote off. No Sudden Move is a sharp, cynical genre exercise about who gets paid and who gets buried.