The common consensus of Ocean’s Twelve was that not only had Danny Ocean and his lovable band of rogues bitten off more than they could chew, but it seemed that director Steven Soderbergh had too. While his remake of the 1960s film delivered a quinisential offering of slick, sexy cool that saw a starry cast look good while doing bad(ish), Ocean’s Twelve saw its director trying something a little different that – while admittedly clever – wasn’t exactly what audiences had paid their money to see. But with lessons learned and meta attempts to tease the fact that sequels are mostly letdowns, we ultimately got a third outing for George Clooney, Brad Pitt and the gang to play around in.
Would Soderbergh try to deliver some hyper-complex meditation on the notion of the trilogy, or would he – in Ocean’s terms at least – keep things a little simpler and deliver more standard, unadventurous fare. I guess even Vegas has to follow the first rule of show business – give the people what they want.
We return to the world of flashing lights and casinos to find Reuben Tishkoff looking to secure his legacy as he builds a hotel-casino on the Las Vegas strip, but against the advice of a few learned friends, he’s gotten into business with notoriously treacherous invester, Willy Bank, who wastes no time in stealing the building out from under him. After this betrayal, Reuben decides to treat himself to a debilitating heart attack that sees him bedridden and in turn, this leads to old friend Danny Ocean confronting Bank about his shifty business practices; but Bank won’t budge and Danny realises this gives him about six months to organise some sort of payback during the hotel’s opening night.
Gathering all the usual suspects who also are indebted to Reuben, the gang start to plot a multi-pronged assault on the Bank Hotel that’ll ruin its unscrupulous owner in one night, with target one being to thwart Bank from winning the prestigious Five Diamond Award – an award all his previous hotels have managed to obtain – and target two being to get multiple machines and table to pay out simultaneously, thus bankrupting the place before it can ever break even.
As Rueben is confined to bed, the crew spread out while Danny and Rusty oversee everything. Livingston Dell works to circumvent a state of the art AI surveillance system called Greco that measures biometric reactions to catch gamblers; Basher Tarr is working hard with the machinery that helped carve out the Chunnel in order to simulate an earthquake to clear the hotel out in a hurry; Frank Catton is getting himself lodged deep into The Bank by trying to monetise gambling with dominos; Saul Bloom is trying to get Willy to think he’s the Five Dimond reviewer; the Malloy brothers are trying to manufacture trick dice at a plant in Mexico and Linus Caldwell and Yen are going undercover to pull a delicate con of their own. But when a noticable speedbump foils some of their plans, an old adversary swells their ranks.
What you ultimately feel about the third and final outing of Danny Ocean’s gathering of loveable miscreants depends on what you’re expecting from Ocean’s Thirteen in the first place. If you just wanted the franchise to settle back into the similar ebb and flow of the first one, then you and Soderbergh probably have similar goals as it seems like the director was burned a little bit by going too smart with the sequel. The thing is, while I’d usually agree that franchises need aggressive shaking up to keep them interested, the Ocean’s movies are pretty smart as they are without the director trying to confound expectations. So gone is the crew repeatedly getting outmatched, gone is the plan being deliberately too complicated to follow and gone are any subplots involving Julia Roberts and Catherine Zeta Jones which means that the heaving cast list gets to drop by at least two.
In their place, Soderbergh and his remaining cast instead deliver a standard Ocean’s adventure, full of snappy comments, slick editing and everyone just being cool as fuck as the entire Ocean’s template is streamlined into something resembling a strangely smug victory lap. No one here is required to do anything beyond their character architype – Clooney and Pitt especially don’t actually do much other than hold court and have little skits together (their teary viewing of an Oprah charity episode is simply just adorable), while Carl Riner must have been pissed that Elliott Gould got to do the majority of his role from bed after his character suffers the heart attack that gets the ball rolling.
Revenge may seem like an over simplistic, franchise-friendly reason to launch a third outing and as a result, Ocean’s Thirteen often feels way to safe for its own good and the main focus here is not if the gang can pull through, but how. However, while it doesn’t seem that Soderbergh and company seem to be underachieving with their latest endeavor, it’s still a hell of a group to waste time with as the filmmakers deliver fast paced, crowd pleasing, witty shenanigans seemingly without even trying.
It helps that the addition of Al Pacino is on board as the smugly impish villain and it’s also great that we get an impromptu Sea Of Love reunion with Ellen Barkin as his assistant. But beyond that we also get a mini Godfather Part III get-together thanks to the return of Andy Garcia’s terrifying Terry Benedict who, in classic franchise nature, joins the good guys in a tenuous alliance to get one over Willy Bank. It’s not surprising, it’s not particularly original and the ditching of all the established female cast seems a little troublesome (you get back Vincent Cassel and Eddie Izzard but not the woman who plays Danny Ocean’s wife?), but strangely none of this actually matters, because by mostly playing the hits, Ocean’s Thirteen ends up being a whole lot of fun.
Watching Clooey and Pitt once again play the “Morecambe and Wise of thievery world” without any effort at all may seem like an easy payday for all concerned, but their chemistry is now so effortless, it feels like you’re just hanging out with a group of fun mates. Plus, you’d be surprised at how effective it is to see various members of the cast wearing silly clothes or disguises in order to score an easy laugh, especially seeing as Soderbergh makes such childish capering seem weirdly classy, even when Matt Damon’s massive, prosthetic hooter is too big to allow him to drink easily from a champagne flute.
Danny Ocean and his gang may be coasting on their charm just as much as Soderbergh is, but it says a lot for all involved that the film proves to be immensely entertaining regardless. It may be devoid of anything approaching tension or originality, but the fact that I wasn’t bored for a single, solitary second proves that Thirteen isn’t necessarily that unlucky a number…
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