Friday

Do we really need Ocean's Thirteen? As you know, I'm a sucker for franchises, but this is one I've never been able to fully engage with. The second film was so terrible that I thought it had been killed off permanently. Not so. I greatly respect the director, Soderbergh, but it seems his 'box office' films are often empty star-vehicles. However, I will no doubt go to see it anyway because it belongs to what I think is one of the most interesting, and perhaps most underrated, genres in cinema: the heist film. I'll write a full article on this in a few days, but for now I just wanted to say that whilst simple in form - a group getting together to rob someone/somewhere - this is one of the hardest genres to pull off. The 'catch' has to be superb, complicated, yet easy to understand, to delude the audience but let them feel like they've figured it out. The great thing about Ocean's Eleven was that, opposite to most of the other great heist films, they succeeded at the end. It would be brilliant if in this third film they fail.