Better than 12 but not by much

Rating: 5/10 (16 June 2007)

Ocean's Thirteen was better than Ocean's 12. That isn't saying much since O12 was horrible. O13 was a tad better. Al Pacino helped by creating a character who was believable and entertaining. Ellen Barkin was terribly miscast. Her role would have been played better by some riper, younger actress. Brad Pitt look very please with himself and George Clooney avoided being too smug. Neither were all that entertaining and the movie focused on them most of the time. I thought the movie was slow. The caper consisted of solving a series of problems in rigging all of the gambling at Al Pacino's casino. The rigging was accomplished with a bunch of unexplained, magical devices. It felt more like Wily E. Coyote's Acme products than actual plausible products. The mine digging machine was ridiculous. It was way too fantastical to be believed. The rigging of the diamond prize was clever and believable. The trouble with sequels is that the characters are not developed further but are just referred to in a kind of role shorthand. The whole screenplay was a shorthand version of a caper movie. The Ocean story is that these really clever guys have to rob an entire casino against great odds which they accomplish with neato devices and tricks. This movie followed the outline but failed to develop the robbery techniques beyond magical Acme devices. How did pouring powder in the dice raw material actually make the dice roll over by pressing another magic device? It wasn't engineering it was magic. The movie required one to suspend too much belief in reality to make the caper work. A drilling machine in the middle of a major city, that breaks and has to be replaced in a day, and bores a huge tunnel under the city with no one noticing. Come on! It would take months for a team of engineers to accomplish the task of just getting the machine started. The caper just didn't work. The ensemble casting wasn't an ensemble. It was three stars with other people around. The acting wasn't terrible but just egocentric. Wait for a dark and stormy night and rent it.