No Sudden Move: Artistic, Well-Acted, and Very Slow

Whoever gave No Sudden Move its name has a good grasp of double entendres and a biting sense of humor. Anyone hoping for a movie featuring lots of shootouts between rival gangs in the back alleyways of 1950s Detroit will be vastly disappointed. This movie is something else entirely, a slow, familiar, and altogether labyrinthine genre drama about people involved in the mob that cares more about the personal matters of its characters than it does about what caliber of pistol they're packing. It is an excellent example of both the benefits and drawbacks of trying to make your movie more "artsy." It is a pretentious movie, but far from a bad pretentious movie.

It's 1954, and small-time gangsters Ronald and Curt have been anonymously hired for a blackmail scheme. Their objective? A document sealed up in the safe of Matt Wertz, a General Motors accountant. The catch is that when the gangsters show up at the Wertz home with guns drawn, the safe is empty, the gangsters are ticked off, and as one thing leads to another, Ronald and Curt are thrust into a winding maze of deception and danger as they try to find out who hired them and why. If this all sounds familiar, that's because it is, though No Sudden Move makes the most of a fundamentally unsurprising and even slow screenplay.

Organized crime is a lot of trouble, and this movie wants you to make no mistake that getting involved in it will be more trouble than whatever reward you'll get for doing so is worth. Its message is not necessarily one of "crime doesn't pay," but it does touch on how destructive manipulating those you care about can be. The movie is bolstered by fantastic acting, with an effortlessly sassy flavor from the very different people it involves in this tangled web of deceit. Some of the characters in this movie are gangsters, others are innocent people, and yet others are innocent people who get scared under pressure and make poor choices that may or may not come back to haunt them later. No Sudden Move humanizes and demonizes both crowds.

This movie zooms in closely on its characters, giving it a restrained sensibility; sometimes too restrained, but restrained, nonetheless. Its score is extremely sparse, an obviously intentional bid by director Steven Soderbergh to make it feel more real. And feel more real it does. No Sudden Move is a conveyor belt of all the familiar stickups and tense standoffs you'll recognize from other crime movies like it, but it can occasionally feel very urgent precisely because it's not filled with the gimmicks and tricks designed to heighten tension that you'll see in other crime movies. It recognizes that sometimes, a gun being stuck in someone's face is enough.

That brings me to what is probably my least favorite thing about this movie, and I'll give it to you straight: No Sudden Move is boring. It's a parade of brilliantly executed moving parts that somehow forgets to be fun. It doesn't make a lot of sudden moves, or any moves at all, for that matter. It is not meant to be enjoyed as much as appreciated for its strong filmmaking, and it is also complicated enough to force you to invest in its story all the way through if you want it to make sense. If you're looking for a fun and exciting mob movie more along the lines of Goodfellas, avoid this one like the plague, because it's much like a homework assignment; intellectually edifying, but not exactly a whole lot of fun.

Though No Sudden Move does many things very well, I also wish it were a more ambitious, less predictable movie. It's a genre film that plays out exactly how you'd expect a genre film to, and while it's undeniably well-executed, it's also the same thing we've seen before, only slower and more boring (sorry). It has an evident love for both classic crime dramas and history, maybe too much love. It's every familiar mob movie you've seen before filtered through the cliches of an arthouse drama, and the result is both occasionally fascinating and a little frustrating. This is the type of movie you'll be able to predict long before the credits roll because you've really watched it before.

There are movies made either for the audience or for the critics. This is one of the latter, and while I can't say that the marketing is necessarily misleading, it's hard to characterize your movie as "slow" or "methodical" with a two-minute, twenty-five-second trailer, especially when you're dealing with a screenplay with as many twists and turns as the one for No Sudden Move. Nevertheless, slow, methodical, and even predictable do not exactly equal bad, and if you're willing to acknowledge the merits of this movie, some of which are far more obvious than others, I think you can get a lot out of it. Even if it is copying other, better films, it's a good imitation. It's a tireless study of a rich slice of cinematic history that elevates the good parts and throws out most of the bad ones, doing little else. I just hope you don't have ADHD.

No Sudden Move - 8/10

Ezekiel 18:19-23