Ocean's Thirteen (2007)

Such a frustrating disappointment

Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Steven Soderbergh wanted to call this "Oceans Thirteen: The One We Should've Made Last Time "...he couldn't be more right. Not only does it right the ship after the self-satisfied & lazy Twelve, it quite nearly matches the greatness of the original. Stripping it all back down to one heist (maybe the best of the series), it returns to the clever scripting, dry humor & emotional base of Eleven, with Pitt & Clooney cementing their legacy as one of the great cinema duos. Their crying while watching Oprah is everything.

It seems that the "Ocean" trilogy only works when they are in Las Vegas, the city where it all began. In fact, it was hard to do worse after a second movie where everything went wrong. This film maintains the previous cast but focuses the plot on a quest for poetic justice. In fact, the thieves will no longer steal for selfish reasons, but try to punish a villain who double crossed Reuben. A plus for a plot in which the scriptwriter's delirious imagination nearly knocked it all down with such a creative and elaborate assault plan that it lost its credibility. The idea was to recreate the first film on an epic scale, but it was so obvious and exaggerated that it didn't work out. Even with this problem, the film can be digested and we can enjoy and be entertained by it if we don't think too much about that. The cast is the same as the two early films, with George Clooney and Brad Pitt leading, but they do almost the same thing they did before, so there are no surprises or remarks about them. On the other hand, Al Pacino really knows how to look bad as a villain and it was great to see him in another evil role. Vincent Cassel confined himself to an unfortunate cameo, quite unworthy of his talent. Steven Soderbergh, who seems to have recovered from the crash that was "Ocean's Twelve", directed the film fairly regularly and close to what we might expect from him: good camera angles, big care with scenery and the use of city landscapes, some visual beauty that looks good when its brightened by a decent soundtrack, as was the case here. And so ended this trilogy, without glory but with its honor washed.

Come on, be honest, you wanted Pacino to win didn't you? I mean, Brad Pitt is good when he's not doing the fluff action movie thing. He can act when he really wants to. Matt Damon is the same, when he wants to act he can act and when he wants a paycheck he does a boring action film. George Clooney is cool, he does some mad roles......but, I mean, they are up against Al Pacino. It's hard to hold your own against them man.Other than that it is leagues better than the second film and still not as good as the first.The first had some real heart, the third had some great jokes, but you got the feeling that they were grasping at straws. A heist film with that much going on is hard to pull off more than once.But the effort was here and it was a good job. They did a good fight, they just couldn't pull it off a second time, let alone a third.I'll give you a hint. Don't try to justify it and make them the good guys, they are thieves, so long as they are lovable they don't have to be righteous.

I'm amazed this movie attracted so many good reviews. For me, it offered just passable entertainment. In fact, three quarters of the way through, I was so bored with it, I seriously considered walking out, but I was jammed in and it was difficult to move. I will admit that the movie did improve in the last quarter-hour or so, when it finally got around to presenting a bit of action. Admittedly, I'd not seen the previous entries in this series, but the script didn't bother to fill in any of the essential details I'd missed and simply assumed that I already knew who everybody was and what their relationships and motivations were. And it's hard to believe that the film cost a cool $85,000,000. To break even, it would need to gross at least $150,000,000. I believe it did actually gross around $117,000,000. Those figures, I find very surprising. Good old Warner Home Video sent me the excellent Warner DVD, on which I actually found the short, "Vegas: An Opulent Illusion", much more interesting and entertaining.