Wednesday, 19 March 2008

Ocean's Thirteen (5)

The first one was poor, the second was so bad that I'm still undergoing hypnotherapy to help repress the memories, luckily, this third film in the series is better, but only marginally. Set your mind to "disengage" for this film - it is at best a 5 (I watched, but I also watched my watch wondering when it would end).

Reuben has a heart attack after being forced out of a casino partnership by Mr Bank (Al Pacino). Ruben's gang lead by Mr Ocean (George Clooney) decide to get revenge on Mr Bank by making Mr Bank's new casino fail. How can you make a casino fail? Easy, make sure that everyone who plays there, wins, and before continuing to gamble away their winnings, make them cash out. By impossible computer hacking they break into the security system, by impossible physics they rigs games (and even put a computer killing magnetron in a cell phone!), and by impossible trickery they make sure that a secret guest reviewing the new casino has the worst experience imaginable. Then to really top off impossible things, they fake an earthquake by getting the Channel Tunnel digger to dig under the casino hotel (the real Chunnel digger is much more impressive than the one made up toy in this film). There's no surprise ending, they succeeded in breaking the bank.

I suspect that this was supposed to be a "stylish" film, but everything filmed in yellow does not make it stylish. Maybe having Hollywood big names and heartthrobs was supposed to make it stylish, but they all behaved the same - there were no interesting gang characters; it's as though there was only one. The plastics factory guy and Al Pacino, playing Al Pacino, where the most interesting, which was not very much. Some style was achieved with split screen shots, and little tricks like the dollar value of each player floating above their head during the climatic winning streak. One thing that puzzled and annoyed me was just how did they all manage to get into the insider jobs? Ultimately, it was a straight forward story of guys trying to be too cool carrying out some techno-wizardry - it's not a con job, it's an elaborate robbery. And this film robbed two hours from me that I kinda would like back.

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