Ocean's Eleven - Film Review Friday
Ocean’s Eleven (2001) dir. Steven Soderbergh
“The house always wins. Play long enough, you never change the stakes, the house takes you. Unless, when that perfect hand comes along, you bet big, and then you take the house.”
For more than seventy years all Las Vegas has done is crush and make dreams. It has enriched people’s lives and destroyed far, far more. It's an ugly place, where some of the worst of humanity’s vices are not just permitted, but encouraged; yet the things that make it disgusting are also what make it beautiful, and unique, and the perfect location to set the greatest heist film ever made. Directed by Steven Soderbergh, 2001’s Ocean’s Eleven is the most fun you can have at the movies. It’s two hours filled with the biggest movie stars of the time, with brisk, snappy editing, a flawless screenplay and endlessly alluring, warm cinematography - there’s something for everyone to love.
The film opens inside New Jersey prison where professional thief and recent divorcee Danny Ocean (George Clooney) is being released after four years in lockup. Within twenty-four hours he’s broken every facet of his parole and set about assembling a crew of the suavest crooks to ever come together. He has a dream to knock over three Las Vegas casinos in one night: The Mirage, The Bellagio, and The MGM Grand. All three lead to a central impenetrable vault deep below the Strip and are owned by one man, the gloriously sleazy Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia). With help from his longtime partner in crime Rusty Ryan (Brad Pitt), Ocean develops an elaborate plan to rob Benedict and try to win back his ex-wife Tess (Julia Roberts) along the way.
A loose remake of the relatively bland affair from 1960 directed by Lewis Milestone and starring Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Dean Martin and other Ratpack members, Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven improves upon the original in every conceivable aspect, but most of all in the characters. Each of the eleven thieves, Benedict, and Tess, are all wonderfully realised and distinct. It would be all too easy for a film with such a loaded cast to sideline some of the lesser characters, but like in any good heist, everyone has a role to play and no one feels neglected. Each character introduction is a masterclass in how to introduce and characterise: Rusty teaching teen movie stars how to play poker, Saul (Carl Reiner) betting on greyhound races, and Basher (Don Cheadle) getting caught robbing a bank with a sub-par crew. It's rare for a movie with such a large cast to have such well-developed, fun, and interesting characters; by the time the credits roll you wish you could spend more time with them.
Steven Soderbergh and writer Ted Griffin – with the aid of an excellent score by David Holmes – elevate the 1960s film to a remarkable height. While laden with undeniable stars and character actors, namely, George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Julia Roberts, Andy Garcia, Bernie Mac, Carl Reiner, Don Cheadle, Scott Caan, Casey Affleck, Eddie Jemison, and Elliott Gould, the story and filmmaking of Ocean’s Eleven never vanishes behind its stars. Soderbergh expertly balances stars, story, and spectacle, creating a one of a kind filmic masterpiece where tension, humour, romance and thrills combine to become something wholly unique.
Las Vegas today is unrecognisable from its mythologised “golden years” when Elvis, The Ratpack, and organised crime families ruled Sin City. Long gone are those crooning Italians of the fifties, sixties and seventies; in our modern day they’ve been replaced with endless reconfigurations of Cirque de Soleil, countless magic shows, abominable A.I. bastardisations of classic films, and an influx of private equity parasites raising prices and bleeding the Strip dry of charm. Unfortunately, we live in a world where facsimiles of Venetian canals, miniaturised Eiffel Towers, circuses inside hotels, hotels named after bright pink birds and Roman emperors, and grand fountain displays shooting streams of water over a hundred metres into the air don’t align with the profit generating dreams of modern investors. The Las Vegas of 2001 was also unrecognisable from those “golden years”, but that didn’t inhibit Steven Soderbergh and writer Ted Griffin from perfectly creating and encapsulating the sense of wild and untamed fun Vegas wishes it was known for.
This is not only one of the greatest remakes of all time, but simply one of the best movies of all time. It is certainly far and away the coolest movie of all time and, to me, it is a perfect one. If you’re ever bored, looking for something to watch or any way to spend two hours at all, I’d argue there are few greater films to spend that time with than Ocean’s Eleven. It’s a riotous time, made by one of the most skilled directors to ever grace the field, starring a group of the biggest names in Hollywood. Ocean’s Eleven is such a fantastic movie that it may trick you into having nostalgia for a version of Las Vegas that never really existed: a city where the haze of cigarette smoke refracts the glimmer of thousands of humming halogen bulbs into the violet desert night sky, where if you plan hard enough and have cool enough friends, you can beat the house, and where the Bellagio fountain dances a slow waltz to Clair de Lune.
