WEP '12, Day 67 - Ocean's Thirteen Retrospective

For this examination of the third, and likely final, modern Ocean's films, there will of course be spoilers.

Let's get something straight.  Ocean's Eleven refers to the fact that there are eleven people on the team to do the "Benedict Job."  Ocean's Twelve refers to the fact that, in desperation, they add Danny's wife Tess to the team, making a twelve person team.  And since Tess isn't in Ocean's Thirteen, her place as number twelve is taken by tech guy Roman.  In Ocean's Thirteen the thirteenth member of the team is not, as I've seen mentioned in various places online, Ellen Barkin's character.  She's as much a victim as Pacino's Willy Bank is.  No, the thirteenth member is Terry Benedict, the villain of the first two films who goes with the old "enemy of my enemy" routine.

Of course, there were always more people involved in the various scams than got credit as part of the Eleven, Twelve, or Thirteen.  There's Bruiser, the big guy who fakes beating up Danny in Eleven, gets Frank out of jail in Twelve, and places bets to help bring down the Bank in Thirteen.  Or Roman, who provides crucial tech support in Twelve before being promoted into a full member of the gang in Thirteen.  Or the girl who swipes the security card, or the girls who distract the real motorcycle jumper, or the one who works the front desk, or...well, you get the idea.

With all that out of the way, how does Ocean's Thirteen stack up to its predecessors?  Not great.  Oh it's an amusing enough film, but you get the feeling that everyone involved is pretty tired of it.  There's less energy, less chemistry, less pop to it all.  Part of it is the fact that rather than having any sympathetic female characters, the only woman with any significant screen time is a one note "cougar" who get victimized by the team.  Tess and Isabel are both missing from Ocean's Thirteen, and they're missed.

One reason the film may lack the energy of the previous films in the series is that it was the first one filmed less like an extended vacation than a regular Hollywood production.  The way I've read it, the original Ocean's Eleven starring Sinatra and the Rat Pack was more of an excuse to party in Vegas while occasionally filming a movie than it was a serious film shoot.  I've further read that the idea of getting together  a bunch of friends and colleagues for a similar, if less extravagant, fun time was a big motivating factor behind  all the big names who showed up in Ocean's Eleven and Twelve.  Eleven was the Vegas vacation, while Twelve was the European one.

Ocean's Thirteen, however, was where the party stopped.  By some accounts, Thirteen was a much more rushed production, allowing for less fun and games for the cast and crew.  Furthermore, series regular Julia Roberts wasn't in it at all, purportedly due to script concerns from the studio.  All that made it less fun for everyone, and that maybe comes out in the final film.

To me, though, the bigger problem is that there really isn't any mystery to it.  Danny and Rusty explain the plan to Roman early on, and that's what happens, with a couple of minor problems along the way.  It kind of kills the dramatic tension that way, clever and unusual as it might be.  I appreciate clever as much as the next man, and more than most, but sometimes you're better off being less clever and more dramatic, and this is one of those times.

What's more, the film feels much more like a sequel to Ocean's Eleven than Twelve did.  It lacks that spark of originality and difference that made Twelve my favorite.  We're back in Vegas.  Check.  We're hitting a casino.  Check.  The guy in charge is a ruthless bastard.  Check.  And so on and so forth.  Hell, they even recreate the scene from near the end of Ocean's Eleven where they pan across all the faces of the team as they stare at some Vegas attraction.  I get that it's sort of a homage and all, but it doesn't feel like we're going anywhere new.  The old ground may be familiar and comfortable, but that doesn't make it better.

Still, I enjoyed Ocean's Thirteen.  If there were to be another one, I'd probably see it.  Of course, since director Steven Soderbergh says that the death of Bernie Mac precludes his ever doing another Ocean's movie, and in fact says he's retiring after he shoots the upcoming Liberace film, even if there were to be another one, it wouldn't have the same feel.  And since the films have been doing progressively less well financially from installment to installment, I doubt there's much if any studio pressure to bring the series back.

Of course, I'd have thought that about the Men in Black films, and Men in Black III is coming out this summer, so what do I know?

All in all, the series probably would have been better served either doing something new, like some kind of heist in Asia maybe, but if you're going to do a bone standard sequel, then I guess this is a decent one.  I'd have preferred if they'd gone out with Twelve's ending, but I don't regret seeing Thirteen.  I do regret what I see as a wasted opportunity, but it's hardly the first nor last film to disappoint me in that regard.

Netflix should be getting me the Sinatra Ocean's Eleven sometime early next week, so I'll wrap up this series of retrospectives as well as give my final thoughts on all things Ocean's Eleven then.

I'll see you when I see you.

WEP '12, Day 65 - Ocean's Twelve Retrospective

As with my Ocean's Eleven retrospective, there will be spoilers for the Ocean's Twelve after the poster.

In many ways, Ocean's Twelve is my favorite of the Ocean's movies.  That's a minority opinion, I know.  Indeed, with the ways in which Ocean's Thirteen resembles Ocean's Eleven much more than it does Ocean's Twelve, you get the feeling that even the director Steven Soderbergh agrees that Eleven was better than Twelve.  Or if he didn't, then certainly the studios did.

But there's a certain European style to Twelve that I enjoy.  The BMI award winning soundtrack certainly helps, but it goes beyond that.  The story takes more time to develop than Eleven's did, which feels right when it's set in Amsterdam, Rome, and Paris rather than Las Vegas.  It also takes the time to develop Rusty and Isabel's relationship in a way that was merely implied for Danny and Tess in the previous film.  

What's more, Ocean's Twelve has a tension that's not present in either of the other movies.  That's because Danny Ocean and his crew spend Ocean's Twelve on the defensive.  You see, in a standard heist film, the protagonists are on the attack.  They're seeing a target, planning their assault on it, then executing said attack.  In this one, while there are multiple heists, the fact of the matter is, they're all (with one exception) failures.  The team is being pressured by Benedict's desire for his money, and under attack by the Night Fox's counter-operations.  That adds a level of difficulty that makes everything more dangerous.  Especially since, right up until the very end, things seem to be going catastrophically wrong.

Those elements change Ocean's Twelve enough to make it a very different film than Ocean's Eleven.  And that's a good thing.  How many times over the years have you been disappointed by a sequel that was just a carbon copy of the original?  Men in Black 2, anyone?  The very best sequels move the story forward = and change things up.  Ocean's Twelve does that.

That isn't to say the film is perfect.  People who complain that the ending is a cheat are correct.  It is.  But it's a clever cheat whose reveal I really enjoyed.  Particularly the bit with Linus and his mom.  I loved that when I saw it in the theater five years ago and I loved it in on DVD last weekend.  It was just so well done that I forgave them the cheat.  

Some of the other things are a little more problematic, though.  The way that characters are jailed a few at a time means that some of them, particularly Bernie Mac who had TV scheduling problems that kept him out of most of the film, end up doing almost nothing.  Also the whole "Tess looks like Julia Roberts" thing was just silly.  Obviously, Tess Ocean who is played by Julia Roberts, looks like Julia Roberts.  Just like Danny Ocean looks like George Clooney.  It breaks the verisimilitude of the film to play on that point, though.  Having Roberts play Tess playing Julia Roberts was just odd, and I don't think it worked as well as it looked on paper.

For all that, the movie remains a stylish and amusing tableau to me.  I wish more sequels would have the balls to really change things up while still remaining true to their characters the way Ocean's Twelve did.  

But was Ocean's Thirteen as good?  I'll tell you next week. 

WEP '12, Day 61 - Ocean's Eleven Retrospective

Having caught part of Ocean's Eleven and most of Ocean's Twelve on TV recently, I decided that I might as well have a look at the entire sequence of films, Ocean's Eleven, Twelve, and Thirteen.  Netflix having kindly delivered Eleven and Twelve to me, I'm going to go ahead and give my thoughts on the films as I watch them.  I caught Ocean's Eleven Friday night, and here's what I thought.  As usual, and especially since the film is eleven years old now, there will be spoilers after the poster.

First of all, the movie's subtler than I recall it being.  A lot is conveyed with pauses and looks rather than overt dialogue.  That requires a good script and actors with decent comedic timing, and they managed both, for the most part.

Secondly, there's really a lot less overt humor compared to today's comedies.  There's very few pratfalls, no bodily fluids, none of the excessive raunchiness one might get from The Hangover or Bridesmaids.  True, they have the brothers from Utah and their constant bickering, but they don't overplay that card, and the scene where they drive Linus to distraction is artfully directed.  The humor here is understated, and I like it that way.

Something else that I noticed was that despite only a few of the characters getting all that much screen time (which is inevitable when you've got eleven people on Danny's team, plus Benedict, plus Tess), the characters are sharply defined.  Benedict is cold and dangerous, Danny is smooth and charming, Rusty is mysterious and witty, Linus is self-conscious and inexperienced.  And so on, and so forth. Granted, no one character is allowed time to show much in the way of depth beyond Danny pining for Tess, but heist films like the Ocean's movies really aren't about character depth, they're about the setup and execution of the heist.

So how was the heist?  Not bad, actually.  Oh, there are a few holes.  The "pinch" device they use to generate the EMP doesn't actually exist.  I don't think there was enough time for them to get all the loot out the way they showed it. Also, Terry should have realized that there was no way for Tess to have seen his final confrontation with Danny unless someone had hacked his security systems, and since the logical people to have done that were the thieves he should have known that Danny was in on the robbery then and there.  And since, as a corrupt murderous sort, he shouldn't have been concerned with something like "proof" before beating the truth out of Ocean.  Also, if the point of having Yen in the vault was so that he could jump around and not touch the floor, which makes it seem a bit odd when they just blow the door up and walk in afterwards.  Why didn't the alarm go off then?

Nevertheless, it still works.  The timing, the convolutions in the plan, the twists and turns, they're all pretty cool.  What concerns I have with the execution only become obvious in retrospect after repeated viewings.  During the film itself, one is caught up in the action and don't think about the details, you're more interested in  what happens next.  Which is as it should be.  Ocean's Eleven isn't the kind of tense drama where a hole in your suspension of disbelief kills the film for you the way it might, say, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.  The scenario in Ocean's is inherently manufactured, and we all know that nothing about it really reflects reality.  The movie is about style and flash, and on those levels it succeeds.

This would be a good time, I suppose, to compare the Clooney Ocean's Eleven to the Frank Sinatra Ocean's Eleven.  The problem is that I've never seen the Sinatra version, so I haven't got any basis for comparison.  Maybe I'll watch that one after I finish doing Ocean's Twelve and Ocean's Thirteen.

Overall, then, Ocean's Eleven was a fine version of a light heist film.  It was a one and film that accomplished what it set out to do.  It also was pretty clearly never intended to have a sequel.  So what would happen when they did one anyway?  Find out next time when I review in retrospect Ocean's Twelve.