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All bets are off

Three of a kind is again a losing hand
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
June 27th, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
The Science of Sleep inducement. Pitt, Clooney and Damon in this listless sequel.
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Ocean's 13

Directed by Steven Soderbergh
With George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Elliott Gould, Al Pacino, Bernie Mac, Ellen Barkin and Carl Reiner

Watching Ocean’s 13 is like sitting in front of a one-armed bandit that isn’t paying out. There might be plenty of flashing colors and musical racket, but you’re eventually left with nothing except your money and two hours of your life spent.
This wildly original analogy of mine can even be extended. However tiresome we might find the viewing experience, we’ll never reach the level of sheer exhaustion that seems to have infected the film’s cast, who, like day-tripping geriatrics, plod on at their machines as if condemned to do so, only taking breaks for their cigarettes and oxygen tanks.
The word on the street is that director Steven Soderbergh was contractually forced to make this second sequel to his original remake of Sinatra’s Ocean’s 11, and certainly his enthusiasm for this project seems to bear out that rumor. Soderbergh’s direction is as listless as the script is pointless. Nice scenic design, but there’s little else here, with the notable exception of David Holmes’ retro-cool score. Again, lights, bells and whistles.
Gambling mentor Reuben Tishkoff (Elliott Gould) suffers a heart attack after casino hotshot Willie Bank (Al Pacino) maneuvers him out of a new hotel on the Las Vegas strip. Tishkoff’s friend, Danny Ocean (George Clooney), calls together his posse to get even with Bank.
Their revenge will take the form of this group’s specialty, a heist, as well as engineering various highly sophisticated forms of sabotage to utterly ruin Bank. Loading the dice is one thing; creating an earthquake for the hotel is quite another.
Ocean’s full house — that Hollywood’s who’s who of Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, Bernie Mac, Carl Reiner, Casey Affleck, Scott Caan, etc., etc. — assumes various guises and personas to break Bank. In fact, there are so many scams at play (at least two per actor) that it is difficult, should you care, to keep track of them.
There’s the attempt to doctor the new dice for Bank’s casino in a Mexican factory (which unleashes a minor revolution) and a scheme to impersonate an award-giving hotel critic while the real critic is given the worst stay of his career. There’s the plan to disrupt the casino’s ultra-modern security system (thus the need for some Acme Earthquake Pellets), while an even later caper, as demanded by the oleaginous casino king Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia) when he is brought into the action, is undertaken to filch diamonds from an impregnable room.
With so many plot devices in play, why does the urge to study your shoes on the floor seem so inviting? Probably because the film is nothing but activity trying to pass itself off as energy.
One or two actors survive this bluff, Pacino in particular. But he is usually so over-the-top that this well-measured and contained performance leads one to believe that this is perhaps how he manifests fatigue. If so, he should spend a few sleepless nights before every assignment.
Gould (years and talent away from Altman’s great casino film, California Split) makes a personable schlmazel, and there are some nice bits from Mac and Reiner. The heartthrobs are weakest. Clooney is so cool as to be an ice sculpture to proper male grooming. Pitt’s face, like his performance, seems haggard, as if his newly adopted gaggle of brats is keeping him up too late. Damon, eternally, seems like a nonentity who miraculously won the Tinseltown lottery.
There is, however, a stylishness (that word again) to this tapped-out epic, with Soderbergh even pilfering the multiple-image effect from Norman Jewison’s The Thomas Crown Affair.
Still, as with the Pirates of the Caribbean and Spiderman sequels, Ocean’s 13 puts the lie to the old adage that the third time is a charm. They are really just three of a kind in a losing hand.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


Other articles in Night & Day (27/06/2007):

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