Going for Broke
'Ocean's Thirteen' Throws So Much Into the Pot That Its Number May Be Up

By Stephen Hunter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 8, 2007

"Ocean's Thirteen" is too complicated for its own mediocrity.

Oh, it's not charmless. It's not hard to sit through. It won't crush your spirit and send you to the nearest bar for a long 4 a.m. of the soul. It's maybe halfway between okay and not bad. If being about average were a sin, it'd be headed straight to Hell on a bobsled.

The third in a series of hipster capers, ripped off from "Ocean's Eleven," the original Sinatra Rat Pack hipster caper back in '60, it returns the usual suspects to their usual positions doing their usual shtick in their usual venue. Abandoning the Europe of " Twelve," it's once again about a big Vegas casino takedown. Once again, Brad Pitt wears bad clothes! Once again, George Clooney pretends he has a sense of humor! Once again, Matt Damon acts way too cute for a 36-year-old man! And Elliott Gould wears giganto mogul glasses! He looks like Swifty Lazar at Chasen's in the '7os, back when Elliott Gould was big. Carl Reiner isn't funny, Don Cheadle isn't English! Who's the Chinese guy anyway?

The kids -- Casey Affleck, Scott Caan, Eddie Jemison -- don't register this time, though they never did, did they? And what's the deal with Bernie Mac?

The two new recruits, Al Pacino and Ellen Barkin, are the most impressive. They seem to think actual acting is involved. They invent fictitious personalities to play, they do cornball stuff like thinking about their lines, finding appropriate movement and makeup, contemplating motive -- generally carrying on like professional actors. Didn't they notice what was going on around them?

They supply the two best moments, though both come early. In the first, the great Pacino plays a convivial monster named Willie Bank, a hotel-casino tycoon who's just beaten Gould's Reuben Tishkoff out of the Vegas real estate upon which he will erect a vulgar hotel. You can feel Pacino enjoying Bank's evil, his triumph, his narcissistic sense of invulnerability, particularly as applied to Gould, who in the latter stages of his career plays nothing but pathetic losers like the dotty old man. It's a vivid scene, with two gifted performers, and it's a shame nothing in the picture ever comes close again.

Then we are witness to a 30-second deconstruction by snideness where Barkin, as Pacino's second-in-command and gal Friday-through-Thursday, fires a waitress for gaining four pounds and makes the four pounds seem like grounds for suicide. I mean, what's the point of living if you're four pounds over? In one brief scene, we know all we need to know about the character. Again, not much else comes close, as the movie reverts to overly complex, gizmo-driven caper job.

That's in retaliation for Pacino's Bank muscling poor Tishkoff out of his property, his legacy and his health. You can't do that to one of Danny Ocean's boys, and so the others convene in Vegas (site of the first movie and the Sinatra original) and decide to take down Mr. Big and his DNA-shaped motel called, obviously, the Bank, to teach him a lesson and to give Gould's Tishkoff something to live for.

It's here that the hipsters' vacation threatens to become an actual movie. Instead of simply stealing from the newly constructed casino, the boys decide it would be better to rig the games so that at a certain point, the house advantage is temporarily destroyed and odds favor the gamblers. Therefore, in a short order, the whales -- as the big rollers seem to be called -- will turn the tables on their harpooner and destroy the place.

If you've ever wasted time and money in those vulgar, grinding money-vacuums called casinos, which traffic in a delusion they sell you at a cost dearer than cocaine, it's nice to contemplate the collapse of such a thing. (It also recalls a long-ago film noir called "Force of Evil," where John Garfield tried to fix the number to come up "1776" on the Fourth of July.) And watching the various strategies for busting this or that game -- up to and including inducing labor problems at the dice factory or inducing an earthquake to shut down the counter-cheating computerized security system -- are fascinating.

But the director, Steven Soderbergh, is just having too much fun. The details, the plots, the stratagems, the counter-stratagems mount and mount and mount until the thing reaches a point of such overplotted density that it solidifies over and can't be penetrated. Think of Sleeping Beauty's castle, clotted with vines and thorns. That's "Ocean's Thirteen," frozen in a twine of plot. Hmm, what were those two giant $36 million drills for? What was the Chinese guy supposed to do? What about the motorcyclist that the movie just forgets about? What's Super Dave Osborne doing in this picture anyway, hiding under his real name, Bob Einstein? Where's his brother Albert Einstein Brooks? And, oh yeah, you've got both Pitt and Clooney, two of the best actors and greatest stars in the movies today, why can't you think up something for them to do? They just sort of stand there, Pitt eating greasy burritos, Clooney looking like he lost the script and hopes nobody notices, until he remembers: Oh, yeah, there wasn't any script.

Ocean's Thirteen (118 minutes, at area theaters) is rated PG-13 for adult intensity and profanity.