This hoot of a heist movie marks Steven Soderbergh’s return to the caper comedy genre that he perfected with Ocean’s Eleven and it finds the director in excellent form after a brief hiatus from filmmaking that began in 2013. The stellar cast is led by Channing Tatum and Adam Driver as Jimmy and Clyde Logan, two brothers with a seemingly cursed family name who look to turn their luck around by pulling off a big-time robbery at a Memorial weekend NASCAR event in North Carolina. To pull off the high-risk job, they recruit their spunky sister Mellie (Riley Keough) along with wily convict Joe Bang (Daniel Craig) and his dim-witted brothers, one of whom is a purported computer whiz who knows “all the Twitters”.

That line is just one of many that scored big laughs in the theater and while the screenplay by Rebecca Blunt (rumored to be a pseudonym for Soderbergh himself) is packed with well-crafted jokes, the humor that worked most for me centered around the comedic timing of the performers. Whether it’s the way Craig draws out the word “incarcerated” to describe Joe Bang’s situation to Driver’s nonchalant attitude while constructing a Molotov cocktail, it’s the small choices that the actors made that led to some of my favorite comedic payoffs. This is a film packed with one over-the-top performance after another but somehow I believed that all of these characters were plausible in this universe, which is a testament not only to the acting but to the direction as well.

As a veteran of the genre, Soderbergh revels in the mechanics of the mission as he depicts the random acts of preparation that the characters go through, whether it’s gathering seemingly innocuous props like bags of gummy bears or completing odds tasks like painting cockroaches with nail polish. Though he shows us many of these details before the big heist, he also strategically omits some of the most consequential bits of information the first time around so that we can piece things together on our own in the third act. At one point, Jimmy says of Joe Bang’s brothers “they’re gonna know what we want them to know” and Soderbergh applies that same degree of coyness to his storytelling.

While the Ocean’s series sets its breezily-paced action amid the glitz and glam of Las Vegas, Logan Lucky has a more loose and leisurely feel that fits right in with its southern setting. Soderbergh’s introduction of numerous supporting characters intentionally delays the big action climax that we’re waiting for but as we see how each of the players ties into the heist one by one, the reason for the seemingly convoluted setup becomes much more evident. I don’t doubt that there are plot holes that I may uncover upon repeat viewings of the film but the overall package is so clever and quick-witted that I didn’t have a chance to linger on those potential problems.

Being a tale of blue-collar brothers turned bandits, there are parallels to be made between this and last year’s excellent crime thriller Hell or High Water, although that film’s approach to the region’s economic anxiety was obviously more despairing by comparison. Things are pretty much always played for laughs here but Soderbergh is very wise not to condescend to his characters; even if they do end up as the butt of the joke, there’s still an embedded respect present. As a piece of crackerjack entertainment with loads of funny moments and audacious performances, you won’t find anything much more satisfying this summer (or maybe even this year) than Logan Lucky.