Take the money. And run with the research.

Rating: 10/10 (29 November 2007)

Here's a great example of Hollywood with a heart! A bunch of multi-millionaire actors get together with a director friend to fund vital research into Extreme Attention Deficit Syndrome!!!
Well, yes.
Though ADS is very distressing, in this, its most severe form, Extreme victims are unable to concentrate for more than 10 seconds. Are incapable of following any kind of discussion. And cannot remember anything of a sequential nature because by the time it reaches Z, they have no recollection of A to Y.
The total number of Extreme ADS sufferers is unknown, and so the true scale of this tragedy has been impossible to determine. Until now.
Ocean's 13, the project put together by George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Steven Soderbergh, Al Pacino, Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, Elliott Gould, Andy Garcia, Oprah Winfrey, Shae Wilson and a supporting cast and crew of thousands, represents the biggest investment ever made into this field of medical research.
Presented in the guise of "a movie", it discards the usual conventions of credibility, coherence, wit and originality, and instead prescribes a narrative arc that starts, and finishes, at A.
Nothing in Ocean's 13 makes any sense at all because there is no requirement for it to make sense. The requirement is, instead, to identify the extent of Extreme ADS.
In its original form, Ocean's 13 called for God (played by Catherine Zeta Jones) to be a failed interior decorator friend of the pseudonymous Ocean (Clooney).
God is prevailed upon to visit a plague of locusts on a new Las Vegas casino run almost single-handedly by its owner (Pacino) in an act of revenge for Pacino's thuggish treatment of another of Ocean's friends (Elliott Gould.) The locusts are there to eat all the guests arriving on the casino's opening night. When they've finished, the building is to be toppled by a localised earthquake and then washed away by a Great Flood (localised, of course) this being a Clever Visual Pun on the word 'Ocean'.
Too clever though for Extreme ADS victims.
A good thing, then, that this screenplay was junked on the grounds of credibility: Las Vegas is known to be Godless, so even Extreme ADS sufferers would be unable to accept that narrative proposition.
To make it more credible, then, the rewritten script has Ocean and his friends purchase the world's largest tunnelling machine (last seen in action under the English Channel) which they set up on The Strip whilst nobody notices and then burrow under the earth so as to cause enough vibrations to slightly perturb Mr Pacino's building and cause a few things to wobble and fall over.
Obviously, Irwin Allen this ain't: the special effects cost less than the gravy mix applied to Mr Pacino's face by way of ironic comment on Western contemporary Society's obsession with the cosmetic rather than the meaningful.
(Note: this aspect of the "story" was always going to escape Extreme ADS sufferers. But to be fair, it was put in for the benefit of their carers.)
Ocean's friends also recruit a Morecambe & Wise fan (who they?) played by Eddie Izzard (who he?) together with a variety of others whose talents embrace everything other than an ability to act.
There's someone in Mexico who makes or does not make dice. A man who owns Samsung. An FBI man with acute laryngitis. A man who is arrested and is happy. A man who is arrested and is sad. A man who is British and Does Something. A Man Who Is Not British And Does Something. Another Man Who Does Something Else. A Man Who Has Nothing To Do With Anything. An Oprah Winfrey. And Brad Pitt.
There's also Ellen Barkin, re-united with Al Pacino all these years after Sea of Love. Which was a movie. But of which, of course, Extreme ADS sufferers possess neither knowledge nor memory. After surviving Sea of Love, Ms Barkin here drowns her career in Clooney's Ocean.
The esteemed director Soderbergh is there to ensure that everything is as dysfunctional as its intended audience.
He succeeds handsomely: Ocean's 13 flits from scene to scene with neither logic nor explanation (albeit this again has a deeper meaning: a comment on the way so much of America's mainstream movie output is merely the same pack of shuffled cards set down in a different order without ever adding up to a satisfying hand.
(Well, you know where you are with Soderbergh. The intellectual thrust is never absent from his work, and Las Vegas was always going to be too tempting a subject to resist.) And so Ocean's 13 goes on. And on. And on.
Simple humour abounds, of course, as it must: Extreme ADS victims cannot comprehend anything complicated. Thus, Al Pacino's money-mad criminal is called Mr Bank.
It's a type of rarified comedy that is particularly exemplified in Cheadle's performance, a career-sacrificing turn of unequalled nobility. Though then again, there is Ellen Barkin. Al Pacino. And Clooney. And Pitt.
So the question has to be: just how successful is Ocean's 13 as a medical research project?
The signs are certainly good: it doesn't take long to identify the existence of Extreme ADS in the reviews of those so inattentive that they actually thought this was a movie.
And yes: that's very, very sad.
Hopefully though, treatment will be along soon.
VERDICT: Ocean's 13: a landmark in international medical research. 10/10 plus a bonus point for the late Cary Grant.
You Know It Makes Sense.