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Ocean's Eleven |
Ocean's Eleven It must have seemed like
a brilliant idea: Remake the old Rat Pack Las Vegas heist film with the cream
of today's stars, update it by a factor of a hundred million to account for
inflation, and give it to the hottest director in town - Steven Soderbergh - to shoot. Alas, as we say, somebody forgot
to write the script (Ted Griffin). Everything is in place, waiting for the
characters to show up, but all we get is shtick. Even that wouldn't be a
problem if the lines were funnier or if the film's plot worked at all. The story is simple.
Danny Ocean (George Clooney), fresh out of prison in New Jersey, has
conceived a master plan to steal $160 million from the combined vault of Las Vegas's three big casinos, all owned by Terry Benedict
(Andy Garcia), who has also taken up a relationship with Danny's ex-wife
(Julia Roberts), which is no doubt meant to add a human, emotional touch to
the film. Danny rounds up a crew (of eleven, in case you're a little slow
today), and within two weeks plans and executes - ah, but I'm giving it away.
What went wrong? Well,
with a heist film the audience must believe that there is a reasonable
possibility of success, if all plans are followed and everyone does his job.
The tension comes when something goes wrong, when someone is betrayed, when
the clockwork plan is somehow thrown off track. See "The Score" for
an example of a heist film that works because its creators and actors stay
within the limits of the genre. Here, nothing goes wrong and so the film
becomes an endless stringing-together of actions leading to the heist. Some
are cute, some are witty - the meeting with old casino owner Elliott Gould at
his pool is delicious - and some are just bizarre, as we see Don Cheadle trying desperately to reach for a West Indies
accent and failing. Two Utah brothers (Casey Affleck and Scott Caan) are fine as the drivers who can't stop commenting
on everything they see and do, and Carl Reiner, as a retired con man, is
brilliant. But the film itself is an
attenuated series of short scenes that never are given time to build, never
involve us, and hardly even make us laugh. The film postulates that Danny and
Rusty Ryan (Brad Pitt) are old partners in crime, and there is a subtle scene
early on when Danny walks in on Rusty's class in poker
for Hollywood actors, and Rusty deals a cold deck to let Danny pick up some poker chips from the marks. But
somehow Soderbergh lets even that simple a setup
get away from him by losing his focus on what's important for us in the
audience to see. On another, more personal
note: I yield to no one in my love for Julia Roberts, at least in part
because of that great wide thin-lipped mouth. But someone has decided to give
her a beestung-lip look by outlining her upper lip
so it appears to reach halfway to her nose, making her look like the third
runner-up in a Julia-Roberts-lookalike contest.
The film limps along,
never quite on target yet not quite far off enough to joke about. It comes
and goes, and by the end it has gone for good.
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