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britesparc -> The film Ocean’s Twelve wants to be when it grows up (25/6/2007 1:50:38 PM)
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Let’s hear it for second chances. Everything about Ocean’s Thirteen feels like it’s designed to make up for what went wrong in Ocean’s Twelve. Where that movie was smug, this feels cool; where that one flew all over Europe, this one returns to the iconic, stylised Vegas that made the first film so successful; and instead of a complicated, convoluted plot and several new characters, we lose the two ladies and gain Al Pacino. Hell, even Eddie Izzard is given something interesting to do this time round. It might lack the effortless charm and some of the wit of the first Ocean, but this is still such breezy, enjoyable, smiles-all-round entertainment that it stands head and shoulders over the summer’s output thus far. A lot of the film’s success is down to how straightforward it is: there’s no elusive MacGuffin, there’s little in the way of double-cross, and any flashback/forward palaver is done away with very early on, and even then it serves its purpose as a plot exposition device. Instead, we get straight into it, with Clooney and Pitt going on a subtle and suave warpath, conspiring – with their pals, obv – to bring Pacino’s world crashing down. It’s a revenge gig; we get it. And having explained how they’re going to do it, the rest of the film is about carrying it out. The downside of this is, we lose a lot of the tension: there’s nothing to compare with the switcheroo that closed the first film, and because we can all feel fairly confident that the good guys are gonna be triumphant, there’s little sense of menace or threat. Pacino, although brilliant, offers subtlety, nuance and ego, coming across more like a two-bit Lex Luthor then the snarling, murderous villain Alec Baldwin was in the first film (before he became all cuddly and nice in Ocean’s Twelve; and for all its other successes, Thirteen does little to return him to his lofty, nasty position). What we get instead of tension, however, is angst; arguably more than any mainstream franchise since Wrath of Khan, this feels like a meditation on growing old. The younger guys – Casey Affleck and Scott Caan – are given much more to do, and have a genuinely entertaining sub-plot about starting a workers’ revolution in Mexico; meanwhile, Elliot Gould is on his uppers, and George ‘n’ Brad are getting wistful and nostalgic about the old Vegas. There’s even a nice “honour amongst thieves” motif, about the code of the Guys That Shook Sinatra’s Hand. And Matt Damon – forever the franchise’s ugly duckling, always operating in the shadow of the Big Boys (I’m talking about his character, incidentally) – emerges triumphant. It really is a feel-good summer blockbuster, an entertaining, frequently amusing ninety minutes spent in great company. Amidst the flurry of arachnid disappointment and Caribbean catastrophe, we would have been happy with a lot less.
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