Ocean's Thirteen movie overview

Another week, another big fat threequel. We've had Pirates of the Caribbean 3 and Spider-Man 3. (Shrek 3 is still to come.) Now it is the turn of this fantastically smug, empty picture, which comes complete with a nasty-tasting dab of misogyny. As this and all the other franchises continue their triumphant march through the nation's cinemas, I now feel like one of those patriotic French civilians in newsreel footage of the Nazi occupation in 1940: blubbering with futile rage on the pavement while the goosestepping victors crash unstoppably down the Champs-Elysées.


In London this week, red buses have been whisking past, bearing news on their sides of O13's imminent arrival. Its leading men - Clooney, Pitt, Damon - are all wearing sunglasses, as if to protect themselves against the reflected glare of their own fabulousness. The shades and their A-list wearers are super-sleek, super-smooth. I imagine the lenses, and perhaps the celluloid itself, being coated with a special glaze that repels the daylight of criticism. Like a Vegas casino with no clocks or windows to alert the punters to time passing, Ocean's Thirteen is enclosed in an airless, plotless, motiveless world of pure self-congratulatory style.

It's just the tiniest bit better than Ocean's Twelve. To be worse, or as bad, the film would have had to have been a single 122-minute shot of 13 dead haddocks on a slab. That first sequel took the Armani-wearing scamps over the Atlantic for a quite extraordinarily dull caper in Europe; now director Steven Soderbergh has returned to the scene of the guys' great triumph in the Nevada desert.

The idea is that Danny Ocean's grifter crew reunites in Las Vegas to attack a new villain. This is mega-casino-boss Willie Bank, played by Al Pacino with his usual mannerisms: droll croakery in the dialogue and the disconcerting habit of shouting his last line over his shoulder as an aggressive after-thought on his way out of the door. So why do they want to hit Bank? Well, the reason is that he was totally mean to their best friend, veteran player Reuben, played by Elliott Gould. Bank conned Reuben on a deal to construct a gigantic new hotel; poor Reuben succumbed to a near-fatal heart attack on the very construction site itself as the depth of Bank's perfidy revealed itself, and now lies sunk in depression in bed. The guys figure they can only rouse their buddy's spirits with a glorious, retaliatory rip-off. Is this an adequate plot enabler for everything that follows, you ask? Well, it had better be, because it's all you're going to get. Love of kindly old Reuben. That's it.

All the old faces are there, though no one has more than a couple of lines in each scene, and so no opportunity to develop anything resembling a character. As for Don Cheadle, playing limey explosives expert "Basher", well, whatever Mr Cheadle's been doing with himself in the past couple of years, it sure as hell hasn't been working on his British accent, though it's no sillier-sounding than that of Julian Sands, playing a computer boffin. Clooney's attractiveness is on cruise-control, and there's a very strange moment when he blackmails a casino pit boss by appearing to threaten his wife and kids, whose names he knows. That's surely a D-minus in any state-credited charm school?

And the Ocean's series has now gone stag. Julia Roberts and Catherine Zeta-Jones, the female stars of the previous pictures, aren't in it, for reasons perhaps connected with fees or availability. So right at the top of the film, Danny (Clooney) and Rusty (Pitt) are landed with some clunky dialogue explaining that Tess and Isabel won't be showing up because it's "not their fight". Not their fight? Don't these heartless vixens care about poor Reuben?

Apparently not. The one woman in the picture is Ellen Barkin, playing Bank's vampy PA, Abigail Sponder, and her job is to be humiliated with goofy near-sex scenes with Matt Damon, who is seducing her, having calculated that she is what Maxim magazine calls a "cougar": an older woman with a weakness for attractive younger men like him. He is in disguise, wearing a big false nose, to which many adjectives can be attached, though not "funny".

The movie unspools in a series of superlatively photographed and fantastically boring sequences, occasionally 'coptering us overhead for a birds-eye view of the CGI-formed new hotel belonging to Bank. Sometimes we go to split-screen, and sometimes - whooaaa! - two of the split-screen frames are funkily showing the same thing. It is all quite meaningless. As if in an experimental novel by BS Johnson, the scenes could be reshuffled and shown in any order and it would amount to the same thing. There is no human motivation and no romance. Even the romance of winning, the romance of ripping off a bad guy, has gone, or rather been subordinated to a frantic kaleidoscope of scenes and moods borrowed from the first picture and shredded together like coleslaw.

It was rash of Soderbergh to make a gambling movie with the word "thirteen" in the title. The time has come for him and co-producer George Clooney to cash in their chips and call it a night. They're pushing their luck.