Rated Greg’s Top 5 Movie Brothers

1. Brennan & Dale (Will Ferrell & John C. Reilly) – Step Brothers
2. Mikey & Brand (Sean Astin & Josh Brolin) – The Goonies
3. Birdie & Shep (Tupac Shakur & Leon) – Above the Rim
4. Toby & Tanner (Chris Pine & Ben Foster) – Hell or High Water
5. Julius & Vincent (Arnold Schwarzenegger & Danny DeVito) – Twins

Steven Soderbergh’s Logan Lucky is basically a hillbilly version of his most popular movie, Ocean’s Eleven. The premise is eye catching enough.  Channing Tatum and Adam Driver play two down on their luck brothers living in West Virginia who meticulously decide to rob a NASCAR race.  But before they can do anything they must recruit a group of zany characters, each with a certain set of skills, in order to carry out the heist. Highlights of the group include my favorite actress working today, Riley Keough, and a completely unhinged Daniel Craig, who’s clearly relishing the opportunity to take off the James Bond tuxedo and get weird for the first time in SIX years. Sidenote: I don’t feel bad for him one bit. I’m no actor, but it’s hard to imagine a more fun role to play than James freaking Bond. Overall, the film is good but not great. Entertaining? Definitely. But something you need to rush to the theater for? Not quite. You have to take many of the plot developments with a grain of salt, and yet nothing is more unbelievable than Adam Driver being related to someone who looks like Channing Tatum.

I actually think Logan Lucky was directed by the wrong person.  I love Soderbergh’s dark and twisty projects (Traffic, Side Effects, The Girlfriend Experience tv show) but his comedy falls a little flat in my opinion.  In a perfect world, Kevin Durant would play for the Wizards, there would be a TV channel dedicated solely to the kiss cam, and the Coen Bros. would have directed this movie.  I wanted to look up who wrote the film because it’s obvious that they were heavily influenced by the Coen catalog, but apparently the writer is unknown!   iMDB lists one Rebecca Blunt, however for whatever reason it also states that the name is widely considered to be a “fictitious person.”   So who knows, maybe it was the Coens themselves who wrote it, maybe it was Soderbergh, or maybe it was Lala from Vanderpump Rules.  Grade: B-