This is a remake of the caper film made in 1959 starring Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., and the group that was known as the coolest of the cool, the Rat Pack.
Clooney’s been really good in films the last few years after B & R; Brad Pitt has stumbled a time or two, but he’s still good, and Julia Roberts — well, she’s currently enjoying a reasonably good streak of movies. Fill in the rest of the roles in this ensemble with some good character actors, add Andy Garcia as the bad guy, and this should be great, right? The nearly completed work print saw its very first test screening with a large audience on 7/24 in Arizona, where it was 108 degrees and people live to go to the movies as a great way to escape the heat. It appeared to only be missing a few opticals — blue and green shots hadn’t been corrected yet, and while they said the music was only a temp track, it was actually pretty decent. When asked if any remembered the 1959 version, few hands went up. It's an old favorite of mine, so I’ve followed the remake a bit over the last year or so.
I wanted to enjoy it, I really did. It had all of the right elements — great cast, glitzy settings, a romantic story driving the caper, and the caper itself was structured pretty well. Clooney’s playing Danny Ocean (the Sinatra character from the original), our leading man, and he gets out of prison. Julia’s his wife, and she’s divorcing him. He really loves her, but now she’s hooked up with Garcia, who’s in charge of the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas. Underneath the Bellagio is a Safe & Depository that sets a new standard for security.
Clooney wants two things: first, to get his wife back, and second, to heist a bazillion dollars out of Garcia’s safe. The film has a lot of high-tech heisting tools like in MI2 — slick video pick-ups, and a top-secret device to shut down the power long enough for the heist. In the original, Sinatra’s Pals used dynamite to blow the electrical towers; once done, it took just enough time for the back-up generators to come on to allow for the heist. Same idea, here, which is no surprise, and not a real spoiler. However, the plot device used here had a Big Enough Hole in the idea that you could drive a semi-truck through. Remember the EMP-side effect from an atomic blast? They use that here, but forgot that it would also disable all cars, VCR’s, etc., that carry a microchip. Bad science.
Some great chemistry between Clooney and Pitt; like Paul Newman and Robert Redford in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and great scenes when they were together. Poor Julia didn’t get that much to do but to be The Girl, and she had a couple of good moments. Elliot Gould steals most of the scenes he’s in as the money man backing the heist.
Here’s the bottom line. I really wanted to like it. It reminded me of how I felt and what I thought when Star Trek: TMP first came out. You liked seeing these people together, the visuals were pretty good, there were definitely some good moments, etc. BUT, the movie was empty — there was no heart to it. We’ve had a lot of movies like that in the past few years — The Avengers, Lara Croft, etc. No matter how much money the producers throw at the screen with casting, effects, locations, etc., its amazing how often they overlook the importance of a good, tight, script. It gets a ‘B’ for effort, but misses the mark.
