Trouble staying awake

Rating: 5/10 (28 January 2002)

Having been listening to all the good reviews I was so looking forward to seeing this film, with its cast of handsome men and all, but was quite disappointed. I have not seen the original so I guess I went in expecting a much better story -- expectations set by the more recent and much better heist movies like The Score.
I was also expecting it to be funny. It wasn't. There may have been a couple of amusing lines but none that I can remember. And it took forever to gather up those 11 characters -- and none of those meetings were in any way memorable.
Julia Roberts looked awful (almost as bad as she looked when she played Tinkerbell in Hook) and there was NO chemistry between her and Clooney, or between her and Garcia for that matter. As for the handsome men -- Clooney was so much more interesting as the erudite convict in O Brother, and Pitt has had more appeal in just about every other movie I can think of that he's played in.
Also, in most movies of this ilk, one is supposed to find oneself rooting for the lovable crooks because they are doing it to someone really evil or they are at least morally superior. But I didn't find Terry Benedict (Garcia)to be that bad of a guy -- he was just an aggressive businessman minding his business, or these guys to be that lovable. So, there was no big satisfaction in seeing him getting ripped off big time.
It wasn't awful, but was a lot less satisfying than I expected, and I did have trouble staying awake. 5/10