July 02, 2007

MOVIES: Ocean's Thirteen (Steven Soderbergh, 2007)

Danny Ocean (George Clooney) and the gang are out to pull off another elaborate heist, and this time? Yup, you got it: It's personal. Reuben Tishkoff (Elliot Gould) has been swindled by Vegas tycoon Willie Bank (Al Pacino), cheated out of his interest in Bank's new casino (modestly named The Bank), and the stress has given him a heart attack. Danny has no choice but to reassemble the gang to get back at Willie.

The plot isn't necessarily to steal any money for themselves this time, but to make sure that everyone who comes to The Bank on opening night leaves a winner by rigging all of the casino games in the players' favor. This means defeating the high-tech security system, which their hired expert (a cameo from Eddie Izzard) thinks is impossible; "you're analog players in a digital world," he tells Danny.

The idea that the world has taken a turn for the worse haunts this movie. Reuben takes Willie's betrayal so personally because "we both shook Sinatra's hand," and he cannot believe that anyone would violate that code of honor; Danny and Rusty (Brad Pitt) wax nostalgic about the Sands, the Desert Inn, and the other casinos of the past.

The plot is absurdly intricate, and a few of its details lead us down some uninteresting byways; watching the Malloy brothers (Scott Caan and Casey Affleck) as labor organizers at a Mexican dice factory never really takes off, and Ellen Barkin (as Willie Bank's assistant) is forced to play an unsavalgable, embarrassing seduction scene with Matt Damon.

But there's a terrific subplot featuring David Paymer as the hotel critic whose visit to The Bank is turned into the visit from hell, and it is fun to watch all of the pieces of the intricate plot fall into place at the end. Besides, the Ocean's movies are never about plot as much as they are about good old-fashioned movie star glamour, and Clooney, Pitt, and Pacino provide enough of that to keep us entertained.

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