One of my guilty pleasures

Rating: 8/10 (14 August 2012)

It is not a masterpiece in general since it is not even close to being a serious movie. Still, it knows what it wants to be and it is wonderfully fine tuned to almost perfection. The plot is fairly simple and entertaining, it is nicely timed (not being a minute too short or too long) and it has a finale that stretches almost half an hour without a moment of boredom. All this makes a solid backbone for the strongest part of this movie - small details and dialogs.
Except for some Tarantino movies, you will hardly find anything modern in Hollywood done which such slick dialogs and chemistry between characters. There are dozens of small and funny attachments which put the icing on the cake and make you a fan or in my case an addict:
1. Rusty and Ocean together on screen 2. Rusty eating in almost every scene. There is (obviously) no need for that, but it is there. And you feel like it is natural that it should be there. 3. Amazing Yen and his conversations with others. 4. The whole joke about Linus (Matt Damon) being a rookie and trying to achieve reputation of Ocean and Rusty (and in real life Clooney and Pitt as a movie star). 5. Small, almost unnoticed comments like when Topher says "actually, they're both named Bernie" or "I'll never forgive you for the thing with the guy in the place". There are about a hundred of lines like that which people who watch the movie for the first time will not understand, but after several viewings they easily become insider jokes. 6. It's a heist movie and yet there are no dead people and no weapons used. Not to mention no CGI, no massive explosions and no sex on screen. It can be done and it was done. 7. Fictional Lewis vs. Klicko match as a background event, brilliant. At the time they agreed only for this fictional match for the movie, the real fight was arranged months after that. 8. Best advertisement for Las Vegas ever. My trip to Vegas would not be the same without first watching this movie many times.