When worlds kaleidoscope: Vincent Cassel plays a wallflower in search of diamonds.

Drop in the Ocean's

Steven Soderbergh’s third installment is slick and forgettable.

by Sean Burns

Silky smooth, lighter than air and instantly forgettable, Steven Soderbergh’s second sequel to his 2001 remake glides by effortlessly, as if on cruise control. The kind of summer diversion you’ll go see just because the stars are attractive and the movie theater has air conditioning, Ocean’s Thirteen is fast-paced, useless frivolity. It’s fairly charming, extremely well put-together, and by this time next week I doubt I’ll remember even having seen it.

Of course it didn’t have to be this way. Ocean’s Eleven found Soderbergh remaking the lazy 1960 Rat Pack caper as a deceptively breezy, exquisitely controlled exercise in craftsmanship. Sure, George Clooney and Brad Pitt played it laid-back, but the picture was as solidly plotted and visually rigorous as maybe any popcorn flick since the original Die Hard. One of my very favorite movies released that year, Eleven wears extremely well on repeat viewings, mostly because of Soderbergh’s talent for communicating story through images.

And herein lies the tragedy of Steven Soderbergh—a wildly erratic, stubbornly indie filmmaker who’d probably rank as one of the greats if only he had the good sense to whore himself out more often. There aren’t a lot of directors who could spin gold out of asinine Hollywood screenplays like Erin Brockovich and Traffic, but this guy is so absurdly talented he more than sold me on those stories.

But he’s a restless spirit, Soderbergh. And for every misunderstood, unloved gem like Schizopolis or Solaris, he tends to grind out at least two or three arthouse wanks along the lines of Full Frontal, Bubble and The Good German. As a devoted Robert Altman aficionado, I fully understand that chasing down deadends is all part of an artist’s process, but Soderbergh still strikes me as an auteur who’d probably be better off as a journeyman.

Stripped down and bare boned—at least compared to the fatuous, slapdash Ocean’s Twelve (such an epic monument to E! channel star-fuckery that watching the movie felt a bit like being denied at the velvet rope for a party at Clooney’s Lake Como villa)—Thirteen is leaner, meaner and pretty much nothing but plot.

Elliott Gould’s adorably tacky old-Vegas businessman Reuben Tishkoff finds himself played for a sucker by Al Pacino’s henna-haired corporate smoothie, appropriately named Willy Bank. (Sporting a spray-tan that would make Lindsay Lohan orange with envy, Pacino surprisingly keeps a lid on the scenery-chewing, instead rediscovering the art of insinuation.)

Tishkoff’s so bereft that a pink-suspendered shark would dare break old-school codes of conduct (“We both shook the hand of Sinatra,” Gould bellows. “That used to mean something”), it falls to Clooney, Pitt and the usual gang of idiots to exact sweet revenge while Reuben lies in some sort of catatonic semicoma.

The twist this time is that Clooney’s Danny Ocean doesn’t want to rob Pacino’s casino—he just wants to rig all the games so the house will go bankrupt during the opening night gala. Security has advanced slightly since the days of Sinatra’s gang, so such an endeavor involves not just out-smarting an A.I.-enhanced HAL 9000 supercomputer that reads players’ blink patterns and body temperatures, but also infiltrating and overthrowing an underfunded Mexican dice factory. Our boys then tunnel under the state of Nevada to simulate an earthquake, and even humiliate a poor nebbishy critic. (Is nothing sacred?)

There’s also a diamond heist involved, wherein Matt Damon finds himself fumbling around in a gigantic prosthetic nose attempting to seduce Ellen Barkin’s foxy cougar. The best gag in these Ocean’s movies has always been watching Damon give a fully realized comic performance, while Clooney and Pitt just stand around making fun of him and oozing cool.

But the big in-joke here is that Damon’s gross Kidman-Hours nosepiece is the exact prosthetic former Miramax studio boss Harvey Weinstein famously wouldn’t allow him to wear in Terry Gilliam’s The Brothers Grimm—so the whole stunt feels like a bit of semisatisfying, after-the-fact score settling.

It’s worth noting that both Julia Roberts and Catherine Zeta-Jones sat this one out, and during Ocean’s Thirteen Clooney and Pitt only casually mention their off-screen relationship troubles. (When Damon asks what happened to the ladies, he’s offered a brusque: “It’s not their fight.”) Freed from any romantic subplots, Soderbergh spins off into Howard Hawks territory, hammering hard on the boys-club camaraderie and emphasizing low-key, masculine professionalism uber alles.

The cheerfully understated, guysie Rio Bravo tone prevails, save for the film’s best scene—a throwaway during which Pitt catches a teary-eyed Clooney watching Oprah. “I just bit into a pepper, so my eyes might be watering,” the too-cool Danny Ocean explains, but by that time Pitt has already started getting misty in front of the television too.

A few more moments like that one, and Ocean’s Thirteen might’ve even been memorable.