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With a skimpy story and less than sparkling dialogue, Steven Soderbergh's movie hopes to get by on the charm of its cast. Another pack did it better in 1960.
By STEVE PERSALL
© St. Petersburg Times, published December 6, 2001
Steven Soderbergh has turned the 1960 Rat Pack movie Ocean's Eleven into a Cheshire cat kind of remake, a giant, sly grin with nothing behind it. Both versions existed only on star power, and they don't make stars like they used to.
The original version was a royally paid holiday for Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford and a few of their closest drinking buddies. They simply played themselves under assumed names, wisecrackers sipping cocktails and sizing up women, occasionally advancing a thin plot about a Las Vegas casino robbery. Cool then, cheesy cool now.
Soderbergh's film gives that skimpy story more heft than it deserves with a cast that, although bankable, doesn't have the potential to be a generational landmark. It isn't enough to simply round up a bunch of stars to work cheaply. Watching the first Ocean's Eleven is like eavesdropping on an envied, exclusive club. The second one is an open invitation to a strategic ego trip.
One highlight for Tampa Bay area audiences is a four-minute segment filmed this year at Derby Lane greyhound track in St. Petersburg. Viewers can scan the background for friends who worked as extras without worrying about missing a key bit of dialogue among the principal actors.
George Clooney takes Sinatra's role as Danny Ocean, a thief with plans to rob three casinos in one night. (Sinatra hit seven, by the way.) He assembles a crew of specialized accomplices: a gambling expert (Brad Pitt), a pickpocket (Matt Damon), a con artist (Carl Reiner) and seven others who matter only briefly. The targets are owned by a Vegas tycoon (Andy Garcia) who's dating Danny's ex-wife, Tess (Julia Roberts).
What a cast, or, more to the point, what a waste of a cast. Ocean's Eleven redux is seldom exciting or clever, exposing itself to unfavorable comparisons with the original because its only trait is modern stardom. People worked -- or sucked up -- harder to be famous in the Rat Pack's day.
Does anyone believe that 50 years from now Clooney will be as revered as Sinatra? Or Pitt will symbolize a lifestyle as Dino did? No, because practically anyone in show business gets that kind of attention now, if only from sycophants in the privacy of their own dressing rooms. The Rat Pack showed stars of any generation how to carouse, setting an amoral standard others died trying to live up to.
By remaking Ocean's Eleven with instant, homogenized stars, Soderbergh loses the lone reason this story should be told again. It's just a heist movie, and not a well-defined one at that. Technology in the 1960s made the idea of shutting off all Las Vegas electricity a daring move. Soderbergh and screenwriter Ted Griffin have tougher security systems to crack, and some of the necessary, impossibly convenient gadgets are silly.
The lack of substance in Griffin's screenplay suggests that Soderbergh figured charm would pull him through. The title gives away the main problem: 11 people (plus an ex-wife and a villain) are simply too many characters to examine in these circumstances. Several actors, including Damon, get one decent scene, then blend into the background. A single scene is enough if it's sharply written. Griffin manages that only once, when Danny and Tess meet again.
More often, Griffin's dialogue sounds like any other caper flick camaraderie. We've heard these lines before in better movies. Some scenes are needlessly long, such as Elliott Gould's warning about the robbery's risk and Pitt's poker lessons for vapid movie stars. Something isn't being revealed that Soderbergh intensely believes is there, somewhere under the attitude.
When the plan finally goes into action, Ocean's Eleven becomes a blur of high-tech crisis intervention and lame close calls. Characters we don't know do things we don't understand, and when we do, what's the big deal?
The big deal, of course, is the casting. The casting hysteria created when Clooney and Roberts came aboard resulted in bargain salaries for actors expecting a nice back-end check. The new Ocean's Eleven is designed only to make cash registers ring. Sinatra and his crew did it purely for the ring-a-ding-ding.
Grade: C+
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Cast: George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, Matt Damon, Andy Garcia, Carl Reiner, Don Cheadle, Bernie Mac, Elliott Gould
Screenplay: Ted Griffin, based on the 1960 screenplay by Harry Brown and Charles Lederer
Rating: PG-13; profanity, mild violence, brief sensuality
Running time: 118 min.