Main cast: George Clooney (Danny Ocean), Brad Pitt (Dusty Ryan), Julia Roberts (Tess Ocean), Casey Affleck (Virgil Malloy), Scott Caan (Turk Malloy), Don Cheadle (Roscoe Means), Bernie Mac (Frank Catton, Matt Damon (Linus Caldwell), Qin Shaobo (The Amazing Yen), Andy Garcia (Harry Benedict), Carl Reiner (Saul Bloom), Eddie Jemison (Livingston Dell), and Elliott Gould (Ruben Tischkoff)
Director: Steven Soderbergh
A pointless remake of the 1960 movie of the same name, Ocean’s Eleven is at best a vanity ego-stoking project for the main stars. They all – okay, the main three stars Julia Roberts, Matt Damon, and Brad Pitt – took pay cuts. So this must be their equivalent of a beer guzzling party, I guess.
The story is about this Danny Ocean who, upon his release from jail, seeks out his old and secret boyfriend Dusty Ryan. Only, of course, we aren’t supposed to know that they are boyfriends, see, we are supposed to infer from the way Dusty leans over Danny and casts those doe-eyed “You’ve been practicing this, haven’t you” looks at Danny. He’s so obviously wanting to tell Danny, “You’ve been practicing that in prison, haven’t you?” but alas, Hollywood prevails and slashy wholesome goodness dies.
Danny and Dusty suppress all their sexual tensions by being con men and crime masterminds. See, Danny has a beard. Her name is Tess. Tess is now with rich and stable casino boss Harry Benedict. Of course, in a film catered to men, the rich, filthy man with a great job and pockets and pots of money are all bastards. Real men like Danny don’t hold stable jobs, and who needs to provide for their woman, right? All you men in the audience can now orgasm together with this stupid male machismo nonsense. See, Danny decides to get Tess back by robbing Harry’s high-tech casino vault of all its money. That way, Tess, impressed by this dick-flick ooze of machismo, will fall back in his bed again!
Anyway, our two closeted gay lovers then hire ten accomplices, all dull and generic and absolutely colorless except for the excellent Elliot Gould who plays a dapper elderly conman. Matt Damon… yeech. Brad Pitt… uugh. George Clooney is pretty good, but he has zero chemistry with Julia Roberts. Roberts, by the way, is this close to being an ornament.
There are many inside jokes poking fun at Mr Pitt’s checkered past as a driver for strip-o-grams, the actors’ previous roles in previous movies, blah blah blah, which only confirms my suspicion. This movie is one big group wanking by stars who, if they put a little more effort in their acting, and by film makers and directors who, if they put a little more effort into the story, could have come up with a decent movie if they want to. Not this mediocre, overlong Mission: Impossible TV series wannabe.
