What Ocean's Thirteen achieves is something standard, something basic.

Rating: 6/10 (9 June 2007)

Ocean's Thirteen reviewed by Samuel Osborn
Back to basics. This seems to be the mantra for Ocean's Thirteen, which marks the end of the Ocean's trilogy. Twelve, the widely despised sequel, made the mistake of getting creative. They changed the recipe and it made the people squeamish. Critics and audiences alike were held utterly aghast. I went back to it earlier this week in preparation for Thirteen. Watch it again, I dare you. It's easily the best of the trilogy. The film is fun, inventive, and loaded with more style than a fashion magazine, which is more than I can say for Ocean's Thirteen.
It's not that Thirteen is bad. No no no. It just follows in the shoes of all the other franchise letdowns to have been released so far this Summer. Between Spiderman 3, Shrek 3, Pirates 3, and Ocean's Thirteen, a 24 hour depression hotline will have to be launched to service the needs of millions of disappointed adolescent girls.
As in Ocean's Twelve, Thirteen doesn't waste much time with back-story. Director Steven Soderbergh starts the ball rolling at once. His obsessively inventive camera zooms, tracks, dollies and swivels its way into Danny Ocean's life with great immediacy. Longtime friend and criminal companion, Reuben Tishkoff (Elliott Gould), has fallen ill. His business partner, Willie Bank (Al Pacino), has conned him into financial failure and left him on the brink of death. Bank is posed to open the hottest hotel on the Vegas strip, looking to nail another Five Diamond Award to his pedestal. Without family to assist him, Reuben turns to Danny Ocean (George Clooney) and his crew of thieves for help.
The idea is revenge, but the sort of revenge that doesn't involve a funeral. Not the sort that "is best served cold," as Tarantino would have put it. Danny wants his revenge served steaming in a fajita of clever wit and tact. His plan, hatched with longtime partner, Rusty Ryan (Brad Pitt), is to break the Bank (their pun, not mine). To rob Mr. Bank, they plan to rig each game on his casino's floor for a small window of time. Within the window, with every game rigged, and with thousands of gamblers winning rigged games, Bank could stand to lose a half billion dollars on the night of his hotel's grand opening.
As you might have noticed, the Ocean crew has abandoned the foreign vaults and international heists for a second romp in their hometown, Las Vegas. They're doing what they know best. For Steven Soderbergh, he's just doing what worked the first time around. This is fine, even if the execution is uninteresting. All the same motions are processed successfully, except that the heist, maybe due to a strangely passive Pacino delivery, comes off somewhat ho-hum. There's no big reveal at the end. No twist or turning of the tables. The heist either worked or it didn't. And that's all.
What you might not have noticed, however, are Julia Roberts and Catherine Zeta-Jones, who play the wily love interests of Danny and Rusty. Their characters are all but absent. We find the men commiserating the complexities of relationships between blueprinting their heist, one always finishing the sentence for the other, but Ms. Roberts and Ms. Zeta-Jones never show their faces. This seems to be a shame since the sly push and pull of the romances in the earlier films made for some of the more satisfying sequences. The chemistry worked. But Danny resolves to not involve Tessa (Roberts), saying "it's not her fight."
Also missing is the humor. All the old jokes return for repeat go-rounds, including the deep male camaraderie of Rusty and Danny, Linus' (Matt Damon) need to impress his thieve parents, the jock-nerd matching of Virgil and Turk (Casey Affleck and Scott Caan), and all the rest of the inside jokes Ocean fans will fondly remember. But new stabs at humor--including a bizarre sub-plot involving the violent strike of a dice factory in Mexico--fall flat. The boys are all fine at the charming and the chemistry as always, but the new material needs work. Julia Roberts posing as Julia Roberts from Ocean's Twelve was brilliant. Such comic invention seems to be on near-empty here.
What the Ocean's franchise has going for it, luckily, is its cast. Put Pitt, Clooney and Damon in front of a camera for long enough and something worth watching will happen. They're the charmers of Hollywood. Just having these three on screen all at once makes for compelling film-making. So, in all actuality, it was never possible for Ocean's Thirteen to be flat-out bad. I guess I just expected something flashier; something as mischievous and as neat as Ocean's Twelve. What Ocean's Thirteen achieves is something standard, something basic.
Samuel Osborn