Archetypes: Film: Review: ‘Logan Lucky’ (2017)

Being unlucky is often in the eyes of the beholder. That’s the conceit at the heart of Logan Lucky, a comedic heist movie directed by Steven Soderbergh, which takes a couple of brothers – their entire “simpleminded” family is nestled in Boone County, West Virgina and carries the generational “bad luck” stigma –  and watches them turn into hardcore, bona fide geniuses. Talk about relatable Jupiterian, expansive optimism with a literal payoff.

Jimmy Logan’s (Channing Tatum) “can’t win” scenario is getting terminated from his job at a speedway in North Carolina because of a bum leg that’s a healthcare-pre-existing-condition no-no. Jimmy’s situation is eclipsed by that of his brother Clyde (Adam Driver), a bar owner who lost his arm returning from the Iraq war.

Bottom line is sometimes you just want to prove the naysayers (including ex-wife, played by Katie Holmes) wrong. In this case, by scoring an anticipated huge, NASCAR-race haul at his former place of employment, given how well he knows the innards of the place because, when your entire clan is living down a curse, robbery is a pretty good revenge strategy.

The archetypal weight here is carried by mental trickster Mercury, which also rules siblings.

And one of the movie’s pleasures is watching how Jimmy’s upstairs wheels turn.

This includes his enlisting the help of Joe Bang (Daniel Craig), a demolitions expert serving time in prison, where a jaw droppingly entertaining George R. R. Martin-centric, Mercurial debate – between prison inmates and the warden during a hostage event – is well worth the price of admission.

Money spiraling within the speedway’s pneumatic tubes also suggests Mercury-the-Psychopomp who travels vertically between gods and nether regions transporting filthy lucre.

Saturn, which oversees detailed timing, is also key. Jimmy will have to break Joe out and then return him to incarceration, as well as orchestrate precision-timed maneuvers that involve his hairdresser sister and getaway driver Mellie (Riley Keogh).

The piece de resistance is Jimmy’s organizational wall plan – a “robbery to-do list” – which serves as a visual that underscores how life’s vicissitudes, which are too easily attributable to lack of smarts, often run on their own idiosyncratic fuel. Such grease does not exclude, via some sweet moments with a humanistic medic (Katherine Waterston), true kindness and generosity.

Archetype: Brothers. Intelligence. Luck. Expansion. Timing. Precision.

Astrology Archetype: ☿ ♃ ♄ (Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn)