Benicio del Toro Reunites with Steven Soderbergh in a Tense, Stylish Thriller

2025 has marked a significant stretch for Benicio del Toro. He reunited with two high-profile directors — Wes Anderson, in the ensemble caper The Phoenician Scheme, and Paul Thomas Anderson, in the contemporary drama One Battle After Another — both of which garnered attention among cinephiles. But tucked away in streaming’s churn is another notable collaboration: Steven Soderbergh’s No Sudden Move, which arrived as cinemas were reopening and quietly faded from many conversations. It still sits on HBO Max, a compact reminder of Soderbergh’s fertile post-retirement phase.

In the Anderson films del Toro’s dry charisma is used to great effect: he often serves as a laconic center, delivering deadpan beats while sketching whole personalities through subtle physicality. In The Phoenician Scheme he inhabits a mercenary tycoon racing through the Middle East to force through a self-interested infrastructure plan; in One Battle After Another he plays a martial-arts instructor and community leader with ties to a dissolved revolutionary cell.

Neither movie anchors itself to specific contemporary politicians, yet both use familiar genre scaffolding — caper mechanics and action-thriller confrontations — to engage with topical concerns, from organized resistance to white supremacy to the corrosive appetite of late capitalism. (See more on the theme of resistance here.)

No Sudden Move, by contrast, is planted in 1950s Detroit and adopts a denser, hard-boiled noir vocabulary. The setup is classic: two small-time criminals, Curt Goynes (Don Cheadle) and Ronald Russo (Benicio del Toro), are hired for what appears to be a routine job with an unusually generous payout. Gangster Doug Jones (Brendan Fraser) dispatches Charley (Kieran Culkin) to bring accountant Matt Wertz (David Harbour) to his office to retrieve crucial documents; Curt and Ronald are hired to stay with Wertz’s family to ensure his cooperation. When Charley seems poised to slaughter everyone in the house, Curt and Ronald intervene — and quickly realize they’ve been framed. The remainder of the film is a tense scramble: untangling the plot, evading the police, bargaining with other crooks, and simply trying to survive.

Ed Solomon’s screenplay occasionally winds into complications, but the tangle is smoothed by an adept ensemble and Soderbergh’s meticulous direction. Soderbergh favors unusual optics here — fisheye lenses and slightly warped framings that compress groups into claustrophobic clusters and stretch the space when tracking a single figure across a room. The effect is disorienting in a deliberate way: the film feels personally skewed, like memory or suspicion given visual form.

Rather than lean on noir’s customary black-and-white austerity, Soderbergh exploits color in expressive bursts — a sharp red, a jaundiced yellow — which pop against the deep, inky shadows and amplify the film’s uneasy mood.

Del Toro does some of his subtlest work here, registering intent and threat almost entirely through posture and gaze. After several years of high-profile sequels and franchise turns — from his return to the Sicario universe to appearances in other directors’ tentpoles — his performance in No Sudden Move reads as a recalibration: economical, penetrating, and mostly played on his face.

Although the film has plenty of turns and secondary players, it never feels as sprawling as Soderbergh’s Traffic, the earlier ensemble thriller that also included del Toro (and for which he earned an Oscar). This movie fits more comfortably with Soderbergh’s lean, experimental late-period work — a sibling to Logan Lucky, Unsane, and Kimi — and aligns with del Toro’s recent collaborations with auteur filmmakers: tight, genre-minded experiments that interrogate economic and social pressures.

When the mystery’s object is finally exposed, it’s not a suitcase of cash or a vendetta in the usual noir register but something pointedly corporate — a modern MacGuffin that links street-level criminality to a broader network of institutional power. The film doesn’t sermonize; it simply presents a world where the person pulling strings looks like a legitimate executive rather than a stereotypical mob boss, and he behaves like a gangster to dodge regulation.

Soderbergh treats that alignment between corporate and criminal behavior with a casual inevitability: Curt and Ronald never morph into revolutionary heroes intent on systemic change. Like most people in their orbit, they do what’s necessary to survive — protect themselves, find a way out, and hope to live to see another day.

Source: Polygon