It seemed that the antisocial – but still relentlessly cool – antics of Danny Ocean’s gradually expanding gang of thieves was long since over after Ocean’s Thirteen made its bow back in 2007. However, somebody somewhere figured there was still life in the old franchise yet when Ocean’s Eight suddenly sprang into action over ten years later – but anyone expecting a return of George Clooney, Brad Pitt and an increasingly hard to schedule ensemble may have been surprised by the grandest texas switch of all – the ol’ gender swap.
Way too much column space has been dedicated to bashing franchises suddenly trying to inject new life into themselves by presenting an all-female cast (yes, the Ghostbusters movie wasn’t amazing, but it also wasn’t the cinematic war crime some declared at the time either), but there’s something that makes a certain amount of sense about the Ocean movies changing things up a little. However, can this change of perspective manage to galvanise a slumbering series back to life, or was the charge of girl power simply not enough?
Con artist Debbie Ocean is released from prison and immediately starts putting a heist together that she’s been planning for the duration of her sentence – and just like her brother before her, she assembles a talented, but wildly eccentric crew to make her illegal dreams a reality. Starting from the ground up by reuniting with her former partner, Lou Miller, she soon recruits financially struggling fashion designer Rose Weil; independence seeking jeweller Amita; hacker Leslie “Nine Ball” Jordan; pickpocketing hustler Constance; and Tammy, a suburban housewife who obsessively fences stolen goods unbeknownst to her family. But once the team is amassed, Debbie reveals what it is the group is gunning for.
Their target is a $150 million diamond necklace owned by Cartier that Debbie intends to swipe during the upcoming Met Gala, but before they can work out how to get their hands on it, they’ll have to figure out how to get it out of the storage it’s been in for decades. Enter actress Daphne Kluger, a bored, somewhat bratty superstar whom Debbie is hoping to manipulate into demanding the necklace be loned to her when the group trick her into choosing Rose to design her dress for the gala. From here, Debbie and her crew start to do the appropriate groundwork to ensure their audacious crime goes as smoothly as possible.
However, this is an Ocean’s film, and nothing tends to go too smoothly if you get what I mean. But as the gang weather the inconveniences of plan changes, new members and the appearance of a character played by James Corden, can they pivot enough to get away with it all – especially when it seems that Debbie’s heist actually seems born out of vengence.
The more cynical of you out they may merely suggest that Ocean’s Eight is just a “regular” Ocean’s movie with women in the familiar roles – and to be fair, you wouldn’t be far wrong – but while the latest offering from this world of zippy heists and cool comebacks may suffer a little when it comes to originality there’s nothing here to suggest the switching of gender results in an inferior experience – because why would it? Despite the franchise’s decade long absence, there’s something reassuringly familiar about a lot of this, even through the series’ mecca of Las Vegas has been abandoned for the more basic likes of New York City. However, it turns out to be something of a coin toss about whether some of these new characters actually stand on their own or are just pale copies of the originals.
For a start, we’re supposed to simply take the rather casual news that George Clooney’s Danny Ocean has snuffed it on the chin and move on as if nothing has happened. While the link between Sandra Bullock playing his younger sibling is fairly cute (they were both in Gravity where Clooney also croaked it), the fact that the former centerpiece of the franchise has bowed out off-screen proves to throw something of a shadow over proceedings. If you’re planning on spending the whole film waiting patiently for him to suddenly pop up and reveal his death was part of some mega-scam, you’d better prepare for disappointment. Maybe this was something that was going to be further addressed in a potential Ocean’s Nine, or Ten (thus completing the set); but as that never came to pass, I guess Danny Ocean has to remain deader than disco. But while as distracting as it is, it’s no more distracting than Bullock’s Debbie and Cate Blanchett’s Lou blatantly being nothing more than warmed up variants of Clooney and Pitt’s characters, only with more chance of some sort of hinted at romance.
However, even though we’re missing some much needed originality (Debbie even starts the movie leaving jail much like Danny did), once the ensemble comes together, the movie starts to spring into life even if it’s often not quite certain what to do with all of its moving parts. For a start, Bullock and Blanchett are great, sparking off each other with the easy rapport you’d expect from a slick heist flick. Similarly, sporting an Irish accent and looking more bemused than a beagle riding a bicycle is Helena Bonham Carter’s Rose, who gets great comedy mileage out of not having the slightest clue about what’s going on while looking like she’s been dressed by a hurricane. Also making the most of her role as an entitled, diva-ish actress is Anne Hathaway who is plainly enjoying stretching those “bitch” muscles – however, the rest of the group end up finding themselves fighting for scraps, which is strange considering it has less heavy lifting to do when the previous films had to juggle busier, bulkier casts. The likes of Awkwafina, Mindy Kaling and Sarah Paulson are well versed at making a lot out of a little, but rather than feeling like part of the gang, they mostly wait around patiently until it’s their turn to fling a quip. Kaling’s entire arc involves her getting into internet dating – but it’s still more than Rihanna gets to do in the thankless job of a key tapping hacker. But while all the designer dresses, audacious twists and fun sisterhood entertain, Ocean’s Eight never feels much more than a crowd pleasing copy when it should be trying to carve it’s own path. Steven Soderbergh’s original forged a kinship between the titular Eleven and Vegas that felt almost mythical, in comparison Eight has Bullock get back at a dull, duplicitous boyfriend and makes us tolerate an unnecessary amount ofJames Corden.
While Ocean’s Eight does manage to hit all the beats of your average heist movie and has a central cast to die for, it fails to invoke the heights of the original film. If you want a standard crime romp that flies a flag for the femmes, the maiden voyage of Debbie Ocean’s crew is one spin-off that never quite gets turned up to eleven.
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