Diksha Sundriyal
Directed by Steven Soderbergh, 2017’s ‘Logan Lucky’ presents a fresh spin on the heist genre. The story centers around the Logan siblings, who, led by the eldest one, Jimmy, execute a heist that will solve all their problems. It begins with Jimmy getting fired from his job and discovering that his ex-wife and her husband are moving to a different town, which means his will daughter will go with them, too. He needs money to make sure he can still be in his daughter’s life, and that’s when he comes up with the idea of the heist.
His construction job under the tunnels of Charlotte Motor Speedway leads him to the discovery of the pneumatic tube system through which the cash from the speedway is sent to the vault. The idea is to extract the money through the tubes, and while there are a few hitches, like pushing the plan up by one week, it all works out fine. But then, Jimmy does something that shocks everyone on the team. SPOILERS AHEAD
Why Didn’t Jimmy Keep the Money?
Even with all the unpredictable factors in the way, the heist goes down rather well, and the team comes out of it with garbage bags full of money. With that money, everyone would be set for life, and that’s what everyone involved in the heist expects out of it. At the end of the day, Jimmy drives away with the money in a truck that was stolen a while back, but instead of hiding that stash, he leaves it at a gas station and, through an anonymous call, hands it over to the cops. This stumps everyone on the team because if he had to return the money, why did he plan the heist in the first place?
At first glance, it seems as if Jimmy has had a sudden change of mind after attending his daughter’s moving performance at the pageant. Perhaps he is reminded of the risks, of how, if caught, he would lose all access to his daughter, making him realize that the money is not worth the risk. So, he returns the money, hoping that getting it back would satisfy the Speedway owners and get the cops off their trail. Later, it turns out that the return of the money had nothing to do with the change of heart. In fact, this is exactly what Jimmy had planned from the beginning.
Before he shares the plan with his brother, Jimmy comes up with a set of rules that must be followed during the heist, all but one of which are crossed off the last time we see the list. The last rule speaks of knowing when to back off, and that’s what sets the intention of Jimmy’s heist. While getting the money was a priority, it was more important for him that no one gets caught for it. If even one of them was caught, the whole thing would crash and burn on them, and they would all go to prison. He needed to make sure that the danger of arrest would not linger on them, and this is why he decided to do something that would ensure their safety.
Jimmy’s return of the money has the intended effect. When the Speedway owners get their money back, and the FBI makes no progress on the case for six months, things die down so that Jimmy and the rest can breathe easily. Like the warden at the jail, the Speedway owners don’t want to stretch out the case because it would only hurt their reputation by repeatedly emphasizing the fact that someone robbed them from right under their nose. Eventually, they decide not to pursue the matter any further, and the case is closed. However, returning the money doesn’t mean that Jimmy and his band of thieves walk away with nothing.
Jimmy’s Real Plan was Completely Different
The thing about knowing when to walk away is not to be greedy. One must only take as much as it suits the plan because if they get greedy, the plan can derail, and it can lead to the problems they were trying to avoid in the first place. So, when Jimmy gives back the money, it is him not being greedy. However, this doesn’t mean that the heist amounted to nothing. In fact, giving back the money was a part of the plan from the beginning so that they could keep the actual loot, which was the garbage bags that Jimmy hid separately, and had them taken out by Earl, who threw them in the dump, from where Jimmy retrieved them.
The only people who knew about the actual plan were Jimmy, Clyde, Mellie, and Earl. They didn’t tell Joe Bang and his brothers about it because they knew it would cause a fuss with them. While Jimmy could control his siblings and prevent them from making any trouble by going off the plan, he couldn’t trust Joe and his brothers. They wouldn’t be able to accept that they went through all this trouble for a smaller portion when they could have all that money for themselves. They might have even tried to run away with the money in the truck, and this would have unraveled everything Jimmy had planned. So, he found it best to keep them in the dark and do his own thing.
In a later scene, a Speedway representative reveals that the insurance company reimbursed them for the part of the money that was not returned. This is why they don’t want to make any more fuss about the heist. But the catch is they didn’t really know how much was stolen. FBI agent Sarah Grayson puts up this question: if they didn’t know how much money was missing, how did they make a claim to the insurance agency and get their money back? The answer is either they made an estimation of how much they’d lost and worked with that or that they knew exactly how much was gone, but they didn’t want to disclose it because it might lead to other problems for them. Perhaps the money wasn’t as clean as everyone would think, and the Speedway owners didn’t want to stir trouble for themselves by focusing on what wasn’t there.
Jimmy waits for the FBI to get called off the case, during which he cuts off communication with the others. He moves to Lynchburg, which is where his ex-wife and her husband moved with Jimmy’s daughter. Through this, he makes sure that he doesn’t lead the FBI towards something unexpected by coming in contact with Joe or the others. Knowing Joe, Jimmy knew that he would pick a fight because he was angry about putting himself and his brothers at risk and getting no money. However, because Joe is fresh out of jail and on parole, he cannot cross state lines, which means he cannot travel to Lynchburg to confront Jimmy.
Six months pass, the FBI is pulled off the case, the heat dies down around the heist, and this is when Jimmy chooses to return. Around the same time, he also starts distributing the shares. Joe finds his share buried under the tree where he had hidden his stash of $97k that was stolen by his brother’s ex. From the prisoner who helped Joe distract the prison authorities to the woman at the bank who unknowingly became an accomplice in the heist, everyone is paid for their contributions. Clyde gets a new, better prosthetic arm for himself, while Jimmy gets a place to be closer to his daughter. Everyone gets what they want, and they are all safe, which is what Jimmy wanted to begin with.
Will the Logans Get Caught?
Considering the thought that Jimmy put into the plan and how well it all turns out, it seems that they really have gotten away with it. Surprisingly, a lot of things unintentionally work out in their favor. Had the prison warden accepted there was a riot on the day of the robbery and Joe Bang and Clyde Logan were unaccounted for the entire day, the FBI would have had something to go on with. In the same vein, had Dayton White corroborated Max Chilblain’s account of seeing Clyde and Joe at the Speedway that way, the FBI would have had proof against them, and they would have been apprehended. But things work out their way, and they get what they want, so it seems.
A thing repeated about the Logan family throughout the movie is the talk of a curse. Clyde is the first one to talk about it, but it’s clear that the story of the curse is not limited to the family. Even Joe Bang speaks of the curse, which means that pretty much everyone in town knows about it. The curse dictates that every person in the family has had something bad happen to them. Clyde gives the examples of a few other people, but he and Jimmy are the most recent examples. Clyde lost his arm, and Jimmy got the limp that took away his NBA career. It seems that whenever their luck seems to be turning around, whenever it seems that good things are happening to them, something happens that ruins everything. FBI agent Sarah Grayson’s presence in the bar at the end of the movie shows that the curse might once again be turning the wheels against the Logans.
Despite the lack of strong evidence against the Logans, Grayson is convinced that they were involved in the heist. She has received enough hints to point her in that direction, but the problem is that even if she arrests them, she will never be able to make the case stand in court, and they will walk free. Things get even more problematic when the Speedway owners decide to let go of the case. They have a huge portion of their stolen money back, and what they didn’t get back was reimbursed by the insurance company. They have no reason to keep themselves embroiled in further controversy, so they step back from the case.
This should have made Grayson back off, too, but it makes her even more adamant about finding the necessary proof and putting the Logans and their accomplices in prison. She doesn’t seem to be the kind of person who likes criminals to walk away with their crimes. Piecing together all the facts at her disposal, she knows what Jimmy’s plan was, but she needs hard proof to do something about it. She cannot pursue the case through official channels, so she decides to stick around, perhaps infiltrating the gang so she can finally have one of them spill the beans and implicate all the others. It seems that she might have singled out Clyde and would try to get close to him to have him reveal something important about the case, maybe even get a confession. If not this, then something else will eventually pop out. Considering the Logan Family Curse, it wouldn’t be long before something works against them.
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