Maybe I was expecting too much. “No Sudden Move,” now streaming on HBO Max, lives up to its name, taking its sweet time to get going until around 50 minutes when it finally snaps into place, but it’s too little too late.

Director Steven Soderbergh picks up a fisheye lens, apparently the only one at his disposal, and weaves together a competent script by Ed Solomon and solidly directs a cast that includes Don Cheadle and Benicio Del Toro, but the story takes so long to feel like a cohesive storyline that by the time it does, chances are good you’ve lost interest.

Cheadle and Del Toro star as Curt and Ronald, two Detroit con men in the 1950s who are recruited by the vaguely menacing, mob bag man Doug Jones (Brendan Fraser) to “babysit” the family of Matt (David Harbour), a businessman who works for General Motors, while he retrieves secret documents from his bosses office.

Joining them for the job is Charley (Kieran Culkin), the greasy and overly talkative one who joins Matt to ensure the document is retrieved properly. Unfortunately for Matt, the papers are not in the safe where they are supposed to be, so he improvises and gives Doug something else.

When they return to the home, Charley’s attitude changes and he becomes agitated. Smelling something fishy, and seeing Charley pull a gun, Curt shoots him in the head, fearing a setup.

Curt and Ronald hightail it out of the house, leaving Matt and his family alone until they try and figure out what the documents are and who it is that really hired the men in the first place.

The police then make it to the house, and we’re introduced to detective Joe Finney (Jon Hamm) who doesn’t believe the family’s story of the lone intruder whom Matt shot on his own. Turns out Finney is on the hunt for Ronald and Curt and how they relate back to the mob bosses of Detroit.

Ronald and Curt then decide to figure out what this battle over this document is really about and get as much money from those who want it as they can, without getting killed in the process as the price on both their heads climbs.

From here we get all kinds of threads from Matt’s affair with his boss’s secretary, to Curt’s recent release from prison and the reason why he has a bounty on his head, to Ronald’s own prejudices and work with one of the bosses who have a price on Curt. There are many more — it’s hard to get into without revealing all the twists and turns.

The world Soderbergh has created is intricately detailed and fully immersive into the 1950s from the clothes and cars, even the opening credits feel like a mob movie from that era. His steady hand in the director’s chair is evident with how evenly each scene is tackled. But the story itself feels too one-note, with beats where the stakes should be higher treated like an everyday discussion.

When it does start to come together, there are moments of some heightened tension and emotions . We get some good glimpses of suspense, but they never last long and we’re back to the low, slow talking of Cheadle and Del Toro.

It feels like Soderbergh himself thought that things might be dragging a bit, so he threw in a surprise (and uncredited) Matt Damon toward the end to pick up the audience’s attention again. And honestly, though it comes together nicely with every loose thread being tied up, by that point, my level of interest in what was happening had dropped significantly since the opening scene with their suspenseful and cool drum riffs and vintage credits.

It’s not that it shouldn’t work, either. The dialogue is good, the acting is as good as you’d expect, the direction is pretty solid and there are interesting themes of gentrification, the corruption of the Big Four automakers, classism and brushes with racial prejudice. But as a whole, it ends up just not being very interesting, which is the biggest shame.

“No Sudden Move”

115 minutes

Rated R for language throughout, some violence and sexual references.

2 stars