No Sudden Move is a 2021 Crime Drama film directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring Don Cheadle, Benicio del Toro, David Harbour, Amy Seimetz, Jon Hamm, Ray Liotta, Kieran Culkin, Noah Jupe, Brendan Fraser, Julia Fox, and Bill Duke.
It was released on HBO Max, although it is not designated as a Max Original.
Tropes in this film include:
- The '50s: The costumes and set design evoke the era, casual racism is rampant, and much of the plot concerns the catalytic converter being invented and car companies' efforts to suppress the knowledge of it.
- All for Nothing: Arguably, Curt Goynes is the only main character who gets to walk away with something.
- Ronald gets the full $375,000 from his and Goynes' deal with Mr. Lowen, and drives off to the sunset with Vanessa... only for Vanessa to kill him and take all the money for herself. To add insult to injury, a police officer implied to be in line with Lowen and Detective Finney pulls her over and takes all the money back (plus the money that was actually hers in the suitcase), leaving her with nothing too.
- Mike Lowen goes to great lengths to keep the plans for a hood-installed catalytic converter completely under wraps so companies like his will never be pressured to invest in it. As the end blurb notes, all the major car companies were eventully tried and made to pay reparations for concealing pollution-controlling devices from the public and the catalytic converter would ultimately be installed in cars across the country by the end of the 70s.
- Back for the Finale: Lampshaded in the end by Lowen.
- Big Bad Ensemble: The crux of the plot revolves around Frank Capelli and Aldrick Williams' attempts to have Curt and Ronald killed- both want Curt dead for screwing up a deal that resulted in multiple deaths, and Capelli wants Ronald dead for having an affair with his wife. Capelli actually answers to Hugh Naasmith, an automotive executive trying to steal the schematics for the catalytic converter, but all pale in comparison to Mike Lowen, the head of an automotive industry lobbyist group working to suppress the existence of the converter in the first place, who screws everyone but Curt over to get both the schematics and a large sum of money back.
- Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Matt Wertz is a meek family man, but is actually having an affair and is planning to leave his family high and dry before the events of the film. Vanessa takes advantage of Ronald's perception of her as a helpless abuse victim to manipulate him into giving her the money from Curt's deal with Lowen, only to kill him, and Joe Finney initially comes across as an honest, hard-nosed cop, but later takes a bribe from Williams to let him kill Curt and is revealed to have been working as an enforcer for Mike Lowen's lobby group the whole time.
- Bittersweet Ending: Ronald is killed by Vanessa for the money he got from Mike Lowen, and Curt doesn't even get to keep a single cent of it due to Aldrick Watkins capturing him. Vanessa then loses the money to a cop that's under the payroll of Lowen, who gets it back. On the upside, Curt is set free by Watkins with enough money taken from Naismith to leave Detroit, and Lowen and his company will face repercussions for suppressing the catalytic converter blueprints.
- Boom, Headshot!:
- Curt delivers one to Charlie upon realizing he was about to murder Matt and his entire family.
- Frank Capelli gets one courtesy of his battered wife Vanessa.
- Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Vanessa over the course of the film kills both of her lovers.
- Didn't See That Coming: Mike Lowen didn't expect to see Curt and Ronald, two lowly mooks unaffiliated with any mob or company, come to him with the catalytic converter blueprints.
- Dirty Cop: Joe Finney and the rest of his group are under the payroll of Mike Lowen and return all of the money Lowen used to pay off various criminals. Strangely, they seem to do this without any thought of compensation.
- Disc-One Final Boss: Frank Capelli is set up as the Big Bad, having set up the job that was meant to result in the deaths of Curt and Ronald while also delivering the catalytic converter blueprints to Hugh Naasmith. Curt and Ronald get the drop on him and severely injure him giving his battered wife Vanessa the opportunity to kill him after about halfway through the film. Aldrick and Lowen take over as the villains for the rest of the film.
- Dismantled MacGuffin: Curt rips the document in half and splits it between him and Ronald to establish trust between them.
- Do Not Call Me "Paul": When his mother addresses him as Matt, Matthew insists that Matt is his father's name and he only goes by Matthew.
- Establishing Character Moment:
- Upon meeting with Doug Jones, Curtis "Curt" Goynes immediately questions who Jones is working for, establishing him as distrustful and always trying to figure out the full ladder of who's employing who.
- When Ronald Russo is recruited, he sees Goynes sitting in the backseat of Jones' car and declares that he wants to sit in the back. Even when Goynes makes room for him, Russo is clearly displeased at the notion of sitting next to a Negro. Other comments he makes about Goynes establishes him pretty rigidly as a bigot.
- Fatal Flaw: Ronald Russo is too gullible and gets backstabbed by virtually every major player in the film. Luckily he has the much more suspicious Goynes with him to help save his hide. When he parts ways with Goynes, after getting betrayed by him as well, he's finally killed by the very next person to betray him: Vanessa.
- Femme Fatale: Vanessa is revealed to have been this the whole time, playing Frank Capelli and Ronald Russo against each other so that Russo would injure Capelli enough for her to get the drop on and kill him, then later tricks Ronald into giving her the money from his deal with Lowen and kills him.
- Gambit Pileup: Curt and Ronald attempt to figure who set them up and con them out for extra money. As they go further up the ladder, they realize that others are in on the conspiracy as well. By the end of the movie, it is revealed that Mike Lowen has manipulated just about every criminal in the movie in his attempt to hide the catalytic converter blueprints.
- Karma Houdini Warranty: Implied in the end with Lowen, who's revealed to suffer heavy financial losses after making attempts at suppressing information regarding a set of blueprints for the catalytic converter.
- MacGuffin: The document inside Mel Forbert's safe, which is eventually revealed to be blueprints for a catalytic converter.
- The Mistress: Paula Cole is one for Matt Wertz, being his secretary. She leaves him once she learns that Matt has lost all the money they needed to leave the state.
- Motive Rant: Mike Lowen seems very insistent on explaining why he's doing what he's doing and what he hopes to gain from it. His ego makes him determined to convince Curt and Ronald that while they may have chiseled a payday out of him, he's still the real winner.
- No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: The white collar Matt Wertz delivers a humorously wimpy one to his elderly boss, going to far as to preamble it by explaining the fact that he's about to start punching him.
- Pocket Protector: Inverted. When Ronald gets shot in the back, he pulls his flask from his jacket and sees that it stopped the bullet, but the bullet already went straight through him.
- Serial Escalation: The film starts off with a simple mob job gone wrong, which escalates into a conspiracy that involves not only the Italian mafia and the black mob, but the entire automobile industry as well.
- Sir Not-Appearing-in-This-Trailer: None of the trailers advertised that Matt Damon has a role in the film.
- Smug Snake: Hugh Naasmith, the automotive executive who hired Frank Capelli to steal the schematics for the catalytic converter from GM. When Goynes takes over the deal, Naasmith tries to retain control of the situation by throwing his wealth and weight around, but Curt goes over his head, manipulates Aldric Williams into stealing the money meant for his deal with Curt, and leaves Naasmith with nothing.
- Spotting the Thread: Detective Joe Finney realizes there's more to the truth behind the dead man in Wertz' house, since as part of the cover story Matt insisted Charlie was the only intruder, but while interrogating the son Matthew, he says "one of them" before correcting himself.
- Sure, Let's Go with That: When Finney returns Lowen's money to him, Finney tells Lowen that he miscounted and that there was 55k more in the suitcase than he said, not realizing that Vanessa's money was mixed in as well. After a moment, Lowen agrees that he must have miscounted.
- Too Clever by Half: Ronald's greed often blinds to the possibility that the people he would be working with or attempting to con could also backstab him. His failed attempt to sell out Curt to Frank Capelli would have left him broke either way as Frank didn't actually have any real money to give him. While he anticipated that the cops were onto him and the $375,000 he got from Mike Lowen, he didn't foresee Vanessa murdering him for his money.
- Undying Loyalty: Finney and whatever crooked cops he has under him are all apparently loyal to Lowen. Finney hands over more than $450,000 to Lowen and seems excited to receive an $88 bottle of whiskey as his entire reward.
- Wimp Fight: Beating someone up is apparently so alien to Matt Wertz that his method of threatening his boss is to explain the fact that he's about to punch him.
- Would Hurt a Child: Charlie in particular has no problem threatening and acting demeaning towards Matt Wertz' children and was even prepared to execute them on Doug Jones' orders.
