Review of Ocean's Eight (2018) by Schroederrock — 21 Dec 2018

This is a good movie if you've never seen an Ocean's movie before. Otherwise, it's perhaps the most unimaginative sequel of the modern era of movies. Pick any original 3 Ocean's movies and I'd say you'd be in for an above-average comedic heist movie with plenty of cleverness and flash to entertain for the entire runtime.

Ocean's 8 has a mostly-excellent cast which made me think there was tons of fun to be had with a rather odd idea for a sequel that screams "women can do it too and we should make the same movie that's been made 3 times already".

That's exactly what Ocean's 8 is. Forget the great talent on-screen, Ocean's 8 rips off every Ocean's movie before it - sometimes so obviously that I'm convinced I could have written a better screenplay.

So much of Ocean's 8 is copycat material with little-to-no changes and plot twists you can see from a mile away (if you can call them that). It really bugged me because you see so many talented actresses coming into the franchise and you think "hey, this could actually end up being a great resurrection of this series".

It could have easily been better with better directing and writing to fill the time more properly. I kept asking myself "why isn't Catherine Zeta Jones and Julia Roberts in this thing?" since those two had been a part of the previous movies - seemed like a missed opportunity.

All kinds of "coulda-shoulda" moments throughout but in the end Ocean's 8 is just so far from the quality of the original 3 movies that it's hard to enjoy. There are isolated moments that got a chuckle out from me or that I just enjoyed because of the smooth feelings that comes so naturally from this series, but those moments were far and fleeting.

Ocean's 11, 12, 13 are all so much better I'm so bewildered that this movie even got the green light with such a shoddy screenplay. Some of the best moments are the limited appearances from previous cast members (which I won't spoil but they aren't really that important) that are little more than nods to the original trilogy.

If only this movie had been done better... a solid 4 out of 10 but as I said this movie might more of something like a 6 out of 10 if you've seen nothing of the previous movies just because you wouldn't recognize all of the plagiarism occurring throughout.