It's all about the banter.

Rating: 6/10 (9 December 2001)

The remake of Oceans 11 turned out to be more like the original one than I had thought. The best thing about this movie is the banter between the actors, just like in the original. There are a lot of really funny lines (some of them aren't delivered well though). That and some nice cinematography is basically the only thing I really liked about this movie. The plot is very slick, too slick if you ask me. After explaining how impossible it will be to get into a mega-vault in order to steal $160 million from three Las Vegas casinos, the 11 guys proceed to do it almost without breaking a sweat. There are only a few brief sequences where they fear that something may actually go wrong, and even in those scenes the tension doesn't seem as intense as it should be. Maybe that's because the lead guy, Danny Ocean (George Clooney) can do prison time with no trouble at all. When the movie starts, Ocean has just been released after 4 years in prison but there is only a slight mention of how hard prison life was for him. He even has some banter with the parole board as he's being released. As for the characters, all the actors do suitable jobs but there is no character development. They try to create some by giving some of the characters a quirky habit (one guy sweats a lot, Brad Pitt is constantly eating, etc). Plus, these guys must be the cleanest criminals the world has ever known. They're clean cut, well dressed, and they don't even swear a lot. Even the stripper in one scene is fully dressed. So it seems, despite their denials that's it's a totally different movie than the original, the more things change the more they stay the same.