Review of Ocean's Eleven (2001) by Edith N — 24 May 2013

The Only Way to Beat the House.

Graham and I are in disagreement about exactly how much of the original I've seen. It was the Channel 9 Movie a few years ago, and I started to watch it because, as you know, I prefer to watch original versions of things first. However, while I've seen Frank Sinatra show some serious acting talent, it wasn't on display in his Rat Pack movies. And Dean Martin was never an actor. Yeah, he did a couple of John Wayne movies, but that doesn't mean he could act. That's a whole separate list--people in John Wayne movies who couldn't act. Anyway, for one reason and another, I distinctly remember turning the movie off after about ten or fifteen minutes. Graham says we got halfway through. Either way, this is that rarest of films--a remake that's actually better than the original. I suppose it helps to start with a film that's more a gimmick than a story. It's not hard to improve on that.

Danny Ocean (George Clooney) has just gotten out of prison. His plan for what to do afterward? Rob the three Las Vegas casinos that are run by Terry Benedict (that fine actor Andy Garcia). All three of them share a vault, and Danny figures that he can put together a crew to break the vault and make off with well over a hundred million dollars, if he times it right. To that end, he first hooks up with his former business partner, Rusty Ryan (Brad Pitt). They get their venture bankrolled by Reuben Tishkoff (Elliott Gould), who has been essentially overthrown by Benedict. They also recruit explosives expert Basher Tarr (Don Cheadle), acrobat Yen (Shabobo Qin), grifter Saul Bloom (Carl Reiner), car experts Virgil (Casey Affleck) and Turk (Scott Caan) Malloy, insider Frank Catton (Bernie Mac), tech guy Livingston Dell (Eddie Jemison), and pickpocket Linus Caldwell (Matt Damon). A minor kink is thrown into the plan when it turns out that Benedict is involved with one Tess Ocean (Julia Roberts), Danny's ex-wife.

That's also, I suppose, the hazard of basing your movie off a Rat Pack original. There aren't a lot of women in this movie. Oh, Angie Dickinson, who was Bea Ocean in the original, gets a cameo, along with Eydie Gormé. However, Tess is the only female character to get a name, not a description or "as herself." So yeah. I get a little tired of this; there's this odd assumption that movies with women as characters are more for women than for men, but movies with men as characters are more universal. I suppose we let them get away with this, because we will keep going to those movies regardless. I mean, what else are we going to do? Stay home? I do think that one or two of the characters could have been made female with no real damage to the story, especially given that several of the characters start blending together after a while. Still, two of the three people on Danny's parole board are female, which I suppose is something. The movie is just working with what it's got.

Oh, the story is ridiculous. I mean, leaving aside all the other ways it's ridiculous, the amount of money they're supposed to be removing from the vault is probably literally a ton. Assuming all the bills are hundreds, which is of course a ridiculous assumption, we're looking at about twenty pounds per million. (At least according to a quick minute's Google searching.) I found a thing online that shows that one hundred million dollars in hundred-dollar bills will fill a shipping pallet to about the height of a person, and the vault is said to hold about, what, one hundred sixty million? The math doesn't work. The movie relies on our complete lack of ability to understand numbers that big. I mean, that's fine; the only thing we can currently make that would produce the EMP that's so important to the story is a nuclear bomb, and we go along with that, too. I just think it's funny that people worry about how they got the fliers in and don't consider how they got the money out.

This is obviously not a movie you would watch for the plot. There is one, but it's extremely silly. Mostly, what we are doing is watching some of the Sexiest Men Alive gambol about Las Vegas. (And there would probably be a fourth, if the "award" had been given in the '70s and not started in 1985 with Mel Gibson. Also, Casey Affleck's brother got it in 2002.) In the next movie, which of course I've not yet seen, we throw in yet another of the Sexiest Women Alive. (Not that [i]People[/i] seems to keep track of that. And I do hope the woman in question is doing better; I understand her bipolar has been acting up.) I think it's also supposed to be encouraging us to visit Scenic Las Vegas, though it would take an awful lot more than this to get me interested. Then again, I suspect most people watching this movie weren't thinking about how much water evaporates off the Bellagio fountains every day and how much that water could be used for something beneficial instead.