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Written by Colin Covert, MCT
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Wednesday, 06 June 2007 |
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OCEAN'S THIRTEEN
3 stars
Starring: George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Al Pacino
Directed by: Steven Soderbergh
Rated PG-13 for brief sensuality
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"Ocean's Thirteen" is as lazy and laid-back as a softball game with the beer keg at second. And it's just as enjoyable. Nobody's trying very hard, and you don't attend because you're passionately invested in the outcome. It's just a pleasant way to relax for a couple of hours in good company.
Every coach knows you get the best out of your players when you keep the game fun, and when your top talent is as successful as George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Matt Damon, the only way to ensure that they'll return for a third go-round is to keep things enjoyable. "Thirteen" gives them snappy dialog, ironic in-jokes about their offscreen lives and silly disguises to wear. If you don't chortle at the sight of Pitt as a scruffy desert rat, Clooney in a porn star mustache and Damon wearing a prosthetic Cyrano nose, this is not the movie for you.
Sequels are rarely plagued with the burden of originality, and this outing blithely recycles material from the earlier films. Casino raiders Danny Ocean (Clooney) and Rusty Ryan (Pitt) reunite their team when their moneyman Reuben Tishkoff (Elliott Gould) suffers a stroke after being swindled by casino mogul Willy Bank (Al Pacino). Once again their task is to breach an impenetrable security system - the hotel is protected by a computer that makes HAL9000 look like a pocket calculator - and deliver the bad guy's comeuppance.
To accomplish the mission, they will have to fix every game from roulette to slots, rig an artificial earthquake and steal a cache of diamonds from an impregnable room - all the while grappling with a pair of villains from their earlier adventures, master thief Fran'ois Toulour (Vincent Cassel) and Vegas kingpin Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia).
Director Steven Soderbergh quite deliberately turns his back on the conventions of heist films. Rather than constructing a crisp, economical blueprint for a casino raid, he creates a shaggy-dog story where the mechanics of the robbery are secondary to the easygoing atmosphere, the characters' interplay and hipster filmmaking flourishes.
The scenes are cut with laser-like precision, although they are frequently blind alleys in terms of plot advancement. Casey Affleck, one of the junior members of Ocean's crime clan, has several wonderful sequences infiltrating a Mexican dice factory. Appalled by the working conditions, he foments a violent strike that delays the plan a while but pays off in a grand joke about the workers' modest demands. The sidebar has no particular justification for being in the film, but it's typical of "Thirteen's" what-the-hell attitude.
Clooney, Pitt and Damon float effortlessly through their roles, looking good and acting smooth (Damon's insecure Linus comes of age in this film as he seduces Bank's righthand woman Abigail Sponder, played with fine comic flair by Ellen Barkin, the perfect Angie Dickinson for this 21st century Rat Pack.) Since they're surrounded by a capable and entertaining supporting cast of regulars (Don Cheadle, Carl Reiner, Elliot Gould, Scott Caan, Bernie Mac and the rest) and new faces (Eddie Izzard as a con consultant and David Paymer as a much-abused travel writer), the top players don't have to do much dramatic heavy lifting. Pacino creates a detestable, bullying villain with a minimum of fuss: He's such a hands-on tyrant that he rants at flinching chambermaids and cringing florists.
All the players have a standout comic moment, from Clooney and Pitt lampooning their bleeding-heart offscreen identities to Chinese acrobat Shaobo Qin, who finally, and very profanely, speaks English. The easygoing atmosphere onscreen translates to a lightweight caper comedy where the stakes are low but the payoff is enjoyably high. | Only registered users can write comments.
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