Filling, but rather empty calories

Rating: 4/10 (6 July 2007)

Ocean's 13 was pretty much a must-see for me and the girlfriend. So we bought tickets, and settled in.
My response to this movie is lukewarm at best. The crew is losing their touch; it's becoming more of the same. This time it's not even about a heist at all, just payback. Oh wait, there is a heist in there too, a plot device if I ever saw one, just to make the villain(s) of Ocean's 12 look like their pompous arrogant selves again. Basically, it feels like all the scraps left over from the first two movies were put in a big meat grinder which was then subsequently turned on. Like a the real thing, the result is filling for a few moments, but it's not wholesome, and you definitely don't want to know about the ingredients which are in there.
Even though the movie has an underlying plot/storyline, there isn't any sense of build-up or tension. Ocean's crew being Ocean's crew, you know that they are going to get away with it, so no points for originality there. And then it becomes a slow-to-start mixture of somewhat funny situations in which the crew is preparing their 'heist'. The movie felt like it was based on some general ideas on what to do, and that the crew were told to improvise to see what they could make of it. I was somewhat sorry as well as pleased to see Matt Damon's character Linus finally seeing some development: he's no longer the klutz of the group. And that was about the only truly original idea in the movie.
And that is really all there is to it. Therefore I consider Ocean's 13 to be the weakest of the trilogy by far. Granted, it made me smirk, some ideas were funny, but it didn't capture me like 11 and 12 did. Exactly like that sausage: filling, but only for a short while.
Go see it on DVD---it can wait that long. And make sure you see 11 and 12 before it, in that order.