A real winner

Rating: 9/10 (26 December 2011)

2001 was unusually awash in heist movies. Ever a popular genre, 2001's crop included one with top box office draws (Kevin Costner and Kurt Russell in the horrible "3000 Miles to Graceland"), a pairing of two cinema legends (Robert de Niro and Marlin Brando in "The Score") and acclaimed writer David Mamet's take on the genre (a film simply called "Heist").
With all of this competition, perhaps the least likely candidate to yield a memorable film was "Ocean's 11", which was a remake of a long-forgotten rat pack movie directed by the hit-or-miss Steven Soderbergh with a cast (other than Elliott Gould) better known for their looks and celebrity than their acting chops at the time.
Movies are often more than the sum of their parts, and "Ocean's 11" is not just the clear winner of the crowded 2001 class of heist movies, but one of the greats of the genre. With a jazzy soundtrack that literally hits all the right notes for a hip, sleek movie, "Ocean's 11" is shot much in the style of then-recent movies like "Casino" and "Boogie Nights" with a rolling, non-stop story set to a great soundtrack that keeps presenting you with interesting new things and never making you sit through a tedious scene.
The story is wonderfully simple, and gets around the basic problems of the heist genre (revealing too much too soon about how the climactic heist is going to work) in a fun way that isn't heavy-handed. Danny Ocean (George Clooney) recruits a crew of odd but talented criminals, each with their own specialty, for an unprecedented robbery of three Las Vegas casinos. And, as the gang is surprised to find out, this may be as much about getting back Ocean's ex-wife Tess (Julia Roberts), who is married to the ruthless and ice-cold owner of the casinos in question.
No one is going to confuse this with a serious movie about criminality, this plan would no more work in the real world than the idiotic one in "3000 Miles to Graceland"), but the charm of "Ocean's 11" is that it's so sleek and fun with its great music, frenzied pacing and larger-than-life characters that you don't really even care about the deviations from reality.
Forget the sequels and the other heist movies of 2001, "Ocean's 11" is the only winner here.