Ocean's Thirteen

The ties are off and the collars are out for this breezy third entry in the slick crime caper serial in which the ever-smug Danny Ocean (George Clooney) and his misfit band of thieves are starting to feel the pinch of old age. When bespectacled oldster Reuben (Elliot Gould) has a heart attack after being duped out of some lucrative Vegas real estate by hotel developer Willy Banks (an unusually demure Al Pacino), Danny and the boys are drafted in to bust him down a few pegs.

There’s a sense that the filmmakers have taken note of criticisms aimed at the sub-par ‘Ocean’s Twelve’ (love interests and pop cultural references are a no-show), though in doing so they seem inadvertently to have remade ‘Ocean’s Eleven’. Thematically, though, this is an improvement on its forebears, mainly due to the way it deals – much like Scorsese’s best work – with the archaic nature of the criminal set: gadget men puzzled by advancing technology; eyes rolled at witty one-liners; action sequences cut through with ruminations on ‘the good old days’. Even Soderbergh’s once-agile camera seems a little more sedate than usual, perhaps finding the industrious director in a more plaintive mood after a string of coolly-received projects. But whether the ‘Ocean’s…’ franchise is really going to fold will surely be for the box office – and not that big craps table in the sky – to decide.