Review of Ocean's Eight (2018) by K Nife C — 04 Oct 2018

There is an open secret in Hollywood that, these days, Bruce Willis picks his movie roles based on whichever unknown ingénue was cast for the film because it's more than likely he will figure out a way to sleep with her. This isn't an isolated behavior as we have learned from the Harvey Weinstein scandal, but it has forced certain prominent men to utilize more subtle methods by which to pick-up starlets. Take Gary Ross, director of the first The Hunger Games film and aid to the Ted Kennedy and Bill Clinton presidential campaigns. He's had to resort to half-heartedly pandering to female empowerment by making this sequel/remake/spinoff of a mediocre heist film series just so that he could surround himself with some of the most gorgeous and talented women in the film industry. You have to give him props for running a job within a job, but you don't have to give props to the screenwriter for this superficial and tension-devoid story.

If there was ever a need to make a Michael Jackson biopic, casting directors ought to strike while the iron is hot as Sandra Bullock's most recent spate of plastic surgery renders her an uncanny likeness to the King of Pop. Remember girls, just be yourself. Here Bullock plays the heretofore unseen and unknown sister of George Clooney's "beloved" character Frank Ocean whose absence is for some reason lamented in the fashion of someone who has died in real life (and, let's face it, after Suburbicon Clooney might as well be dead). They lean hard on this tenuous connection to the original films as there is no other justification for usage of the Ocean's intellectual property. After being released from prison, Bullock makes a bee line for a shopping mall because female empowerment is contingent on how well dressed and made-up one is.

She meets up with Cate Blanchett, and they meet the rest of the cast in list form. Bullock unveils her plan to steal a 150 million dollar diamond necklace at the Met Gala. If you've seen any of the Ocean's movies before, you can assume that they execute the plan properly, and there is a twist in the third act that you didn't see coming because it wasn't shown on screen up until that point. It's so clever how the audience can't predict something that hasn't been foreshadowed or mentioned until the third act. You would think if the story has no tension and there's nothing of intellectual value to latch onto, the filmmakers would at least throw us a bone and give us some snappy dialogue from memorable characters, but aside from a few idiosyncratic moments, the entire cast seems to be phoning it in. Apart from production design (where the Met is doing most of the leg work) and costumes, this film is completely unremarkable past its glorification of materialism.