Wednesday

If you were to ask me whether Ocean's Thirteen deserved 1 out of 10 or 9 out of 10, I'd have to lean more towards the 9 out of 10. It's great fun. The music, the camera movement and the laid-back style are all great. Perhaps you might say it brings nothing that we didn't see in Ocean's Eleven, but then that's not what this is about. Maybe they could've tried to keep (or paid more to retain) the love interests in the story, but Brad Pitt and George Clooney's chats about the dangers of relationships were great all the same. There is a problem with the tempo of the film: there are too many highs and lows so that it comes out seeming all one pace. We needed bigger and fewer high-points. As it is, the film is basically an hour and a half of exposition, and thirty minutes of action. But Soderbergh does exposition brilliantly. The dialogue is great, which is pretty good, but doesn't consistently go that extra notch towards 'classic'. I generally don't like the type of film whose plot relies on characters revealing some secret things to us, but deliberately keeping others. The whole tension revolves around them not telling us the full-extent of their plan, but at the same time having us believing and trusting that they have. I suppose the film is flawed in many ways (too much time spent on the hotel inspector, for instance), but I didn't really mind. It's about style, and this film has it.