OCEAN'S THIRTEEN
2007
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
Written by Brian Koppelman and David Levien
Obviously, I'm as eager to credit the astounding consistency of Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's trilogy as anyone, and if you'd asked me when we started—something that, as a rhetorical device, I naturally assumed you did—I in fact would have already told you that all three of the movies are pretty much in the same band of quality, not quite so identical that they're not amenable to being ranked or quibbled over, but all occupying the same god-tier level of motion picture entertainment. And I said this earnestly, in the hope that Ocean's Thirteen would smooth out on a second viewing, yet knowing fully well that it's the one that has any problem bigger than a literalist nitpick or logical gaffe (though, to give it unique credit in this trilogy, other than recklessly expanding on Ocean's Eleven's own recourse to super-science gadgetry, I think Thirteen is the one least afflicted by plot logic snags, perhaps in part because Soderbergh has likewise retreated from Ocean's Twelve's "let us consider the nature of the heist film and films generally" meta concerns), whereas I think it's an argument that we're going to have to make that it's not limited to just "any" serious problem, since it has no fewer than three. It is, anyway, probably the first Ocean's film (or, if we're still keeping memories of it in our brains for some reason, at least since 1960's original Ocean's 11) that even has a bad scene of any significance, though this bad scene is pretty bad. So it goes: no full marks for Ocean's Thirteen. It'll have to make do with merely really high marks instead.
Because even if it's the least of its trilogy, we're not talking some seismic upheaval here, and there are aspects of Thirteen—film-defining pleasures, in fact!—that ensure we're still dealing with a pretty great Ocean's film, one that still has some very novel places to take its characters and concepts, at least speaking figuratively. It does bring our heroes right back to Las Vegas, of course; but I'd say it winds up being surprising about that, because despite Vegas serving as this franchise's homeland, and despite all the iconography that gets plastered onto its home video releases and marketing, Thirteen is the first (and only) Ocean's film, including the original one, that is remotely meaningfully "about gambling," and arguably it's the first and only one that's narratively "about Vegas as a culture," and that uses its gaming establishments as something besides tackily-decorated banks that are more fun to see get robbed.
And, taking the next step, it can also use that setting to be what I'm willing to call the most visually resplendent of all the Ocean's movies, kicking off with studio logos done up with disorienting op art in the closest this modern trilogy gets to invoking the graphic design of Saul Bass, at least until about two-thirds of the way through this entry it gets even closer. Most importantly, Thirteen gets the opportunity to build its own casino from the ground up to look like anything they want, and what they want is for it to look downright offensive in how decadent and gaudy it is, but in the most delightfully eye-melting way. That's what Soderbergh gets out of the Ocean's trilogy's production designer, Philip Messina, deploying a combination of bespoke soundstages and Vegas location shooting collage, in the process creating the franchise's most complete playground for its super-thieves to enjoy themselves in. It's likewise what Soderbergh gets out of his cinematographer, himself, and "Peter Andrews" is given leave to indulge in the most lurid and most consistently bold colors of his trilogy, for instance a brief interlude with a hacker that takes place amidst Mello Yello green, or the counter-realistically multi-level casino floor done up in woozy reds that make it look like an old cartoon's comedic version of hell. It's maybe not as altogether sophisticated as Twelve, and never hits the same highs; but it makes up for it with full-spectrum forcefulness. There is, in a similar vein, Thirteen's score, courtesy series composer David Holmes, which, because Twelve's "A La Menthe" wasn't his music or even his decision, probably ought to be considered the best and most varied of the Ocean's films' scores, as this time around he's developed some ideas about thriller music that—not that this was a bad thing, per se—can actually feel like they can have other shapes besides loungey jazz cues and driving rock guitars.
So: what brings Danny Ocean (George Clooney) and Rusty Ryan (Brad Pitt) and the rest back to Vegas is their mutual loyalty to one of their own, Reuben Tishkoff (Elliott Gould), their financier back in Eleven, and present in Twelve although I'm at a loss to recall what if anything he contributed to those capers besides some Gouldisms delivered by way of his character's affectionate stereotype; the thing about Rueben is that he'd always been a repudiation, consciously or unconsciously, of one of the most unlikeable things about the original Ocean's 11, its financier (a less-than-affectionate stereotype), who wasn't allowed to be counted amongst the eleven and was treated like trash by Frank Sinatra and company as butt-monkey comic relief during that film's neverending first act. Rueben, though taking on the same plot function, got to be his own version of cool; if we always had a sense that Danny and Rusty had a genuine longstanding friendship with him, that's now explicit. Hence the very first thing in the movie, which might be the best first scene of any Ocean's movie, is Rusty walking right out of the most crucial juncture of a non-Eleven-related heist the very instant he gets the word about his friend's misfortune.
That misfortune is this: Rueben has foolishly placed his trust in one Willy Bank (Al Pacino), a fellow casino magnate. Willy's taken their joint venture—the Midas Hotel, renamed the Bank and that's by no means the worst of it—and more-or-less physically wrested his share away from him, and the stress of it has sent him to the cardiac ward. The Ocean's gang won't stand for it, and Danny makes a vain attempt at negotiation, but Bank laughs him off his construction site; and so, six months later, the alien terraforming vehicle that's landed in Las Vegas and been christened "the Bank Hotel" is approaching its grand opening, and Danny and Rusty and all the rest will be there to absolutely ensure that Bank loses so much money that night that he'll be ruined. To this end, they set about fixing every game in the joint, despite assurances that their games are unfixable, overseen by a powerful computer suveillance system in addition to Bank's ordinary goons; furthermore, because they obviously can't win the money themselves—cheating on their own behalf would be noticed instantly, thanks to that computer surveillance—they also have the tricky problem of the fact that all the wealthy gambling freaks that Bank's invited to his opening are just going to plow their winnings back into another game and, as usual, the house will still win. Therefore, to conclude the evening Ocean and his friends shall effect one more act of domestic terrorism on the Vegas strip. Finally, to add insult to the injury, they're also going to make sure Bank gets a bad review from an important critic (David Paymer) by torturing him*, thereby denying Bank a fifth prestigious Five Diamonds hotel award and wrecking his winning streak.
From the foregoing, you'd be forgiven for wondering, under the assumption the title is supposed to mean something, "so how is that Ocean's thirteen?", and you'd be right for doing so; Twelve's twelfth was blatantly (so blatantly it was established by onscreen credits) as Julia Roberts's Tess Ocean. So you will also wonder, and you might well have wondered this first, where the hell Julia Roberts and Catherine Zeta-Jones are. The explanation given by Danny is that "it's not their fight," and the line given by Soderbergh and writers Brian Koppelman and David Levien is that they wanted to focus on the eleven and bring the trilogy back home, etc., which even if true I don't particularly like, given that the entirety of the emotional investment in each previous film resided in Tess and Isabel, respectively, plus Twelve had such a swell idea for Roberts's participation.
Well, one of those thirteen is, of course, their alternative financier and previous films' villain, Terry Benedict (Andy García), who'd be even more of a great addition if he had more than one interaction with the main gears of the heist plot, and weren't relegated to watching the rest of it unfold as an audience stand-in on secret cameras. (Importantly, however, he does impose on them a further requirement: the altogether-impossible heist of the quintuple diamond necklaces that Bank has had made as tokens of his ego-fluffing Five Diamonds awards.) So that leaves one more, and who is it? Is it the extorted pit boss (David Paymer)? Is it François Toulour (Vincent Cassel), mysteriously shadowing our heroes, presumably eager to get even? Is it just the unwitting hotel critic that they infest with bedbugs? None of the above. It does leave it a startlingly male affair (it's not suborned guest services director (Olga Sosnovska) either), or at least an assigned-male-at-birth affair (the canonical thirteenth is Suzy Izzard presently d/b/a Eddie Izzard's Roman Nagel, their sci-fi tech guy; it seems haphazard because Nagel wasn't thirteenth last time). Such awkwardness is bound to happen with any long-running film series, but one misses Tess and Isabel (maybe especially Isabel, since Tess already got a shining moment that couldn't be topped anyway), who feel like they should be series fixtures as much as literally anyone else. I'm probably at least as bugged about Toulour, who probably should not be a series fixture, if they're going to degrade the demigod of Twelve to an Ocean's also-ran, which is precisely what they do with him, even if it's a perfectly funny sad trombone for a cameoing actor, and his intersection with Ocean's gang, while undercutting his weird dignity, probably does fit his infantile trickster character.
The upshot is that it does return the series to the more democratic complexion of Eleven, after Twelve had to struggle to give the whole ensemble equal weight while juggling all its European locations and distinctive heist sequences across just 125 minutes (Thirteen is roughly identically long at 122), and Thirteen is, at a minimum, as good as Eleven at giving the secondary nine screentime. (It may be the worst—comparatively—at giving Clooney and Pitt screentime: I somewhat like, as acting beats, their bro-ish digressions regarding the state of their respective relationships, rendered in such shorthand this time that it's rarely a complete sentence between the two of them; the Oprah thing is amusing enough; their only fully good joint interstitial, as it helps give heft to a film whose emotional anchor otherwise is almost completely sidelined, is at least really good, when they slow down to take stock of the changing face of Las Vegas, and so obliquely their own—Danny and Rusty's or Clooney and Pitt's, you make the call—passing into middle age.) Anyway, it specifically corrects Twelve's oversights: as for Don Cheadle's Basher Tarr, he gets both a giant Mole Man drill to make fake—hopefully—earthquakes as well as a very silly costume (and dialect) change; as for Qin Shaobo, who got thrown in a suitcase thirdway through Twelve, the Amazing Yen gets to do disguise work as a Chinese oligarch come to blow a wad on Bank's casino, and the more physical element of his participation (which is why Qin was in Eleven in the first place) is some sterling hold-your-breath thrills as he navigates an elevator shaft and the super-fast elevators that threaten to turn him into paste, such as are obviously CGI and have been more-or-less explicitly called out as such, in one of the more quietly brilliant dialogue exchanges in a film that's never as openly poking at the screen as Twelve was, because Soderbergh knows that you, a rube who came here to be entertained, are going to buy into it anyway. Finally, I have a need to actually mention Casey Affleck and Scott Caan—the Malloy Brothers—for the first time; they've been reliably funny doofuses throughout the franchise, and this time they're one of the no-two-ways-about-it highlights, as when the Malloys get dispatched down Mexico way to corrupt the Bank Hotel's dice at their point of origin, they instead get sidetracked into becoming revolutionary leaders, defeating both capitalism and neocolonialism in about 24-36 hours.
So as I hope that strongly indicates, Thirteen has something of its own tone, which adds to the freshness that it might not look like it possesses from the outside: if Eleven was going for 60s bantery American cool in an 00s idiom and Twelve was going for 60s laconic Eurocool in the same—reductive but somewhat fair takes on them, I think—Thirteen is circling back and just doing straight-up 60s comedy, embracing the live-action cartoon zaniness of that decade's specific strain of comedy spectacles (the question "should Casey Affleck become a Mexican labor hero?" can be answered "only if it's extremely zany"). It's pursuing this tone sufficiently across-the-board that that subplot doesn't even seem out-of-place, but it's also pursuing it so frequently that I'd be amazed if it managed that high-wire act flawlessly, because most actual 60s comedies don't. Unfortunately, Thirteen doesn't either; its hit rate is impressively high, and then there's Soderbergh's trilogy-long grudge against the world's best sport, Matt Damon, and together they bring me something in an Ocean's movie I actually hate. It's not limited to the fake nose that Linus Caldwell sports as Yen's servant (or the significant amounts of dialogue revolving around whether this apparently-textually-unnecessary flourish "plays"), though maybe that would even be sufficient. The task that Linus gets for his big showpiece is to seduce Bank's right-hand woman Abigail Sponder (Ellen Barkin), and as an aside, I will say that this has helped me realize what function the Ocean's trilogy played in pop culture, basically filling the hole that the Bond series had left open during its absence (and, for that matter, has continued to leave open since it returned), for a breezy, sexy caper franchise founded as much on vicarious enjoyment and basking in luxury porn as on action or thrills. But the Ocean's movies had only been "sexy" in specific, restrained ways: Thirteen's predecessors had been romantic but not erotic, focusing on "men want to be him" and taking "women want to be with him" as something it could just sort of take as read. So now it finally does "sexy," and uses its franchise's clown for it, as a parody of eroticism, and maybe that would work perfectly well except it's so fucking lazy about it every single step of the way, giving Linus sci-fi magic Spanish fly that does his job for him when it could be so much funnier if Linus actually did have to rely on his own awkward, substandard powers to accomplish this seduction (or better, fail at this seduction) that, it's practically assumed, Danny or Rusty could've done in their sleep.
So that's me swinging right back negative, and for all that I've had plenty of snitty things to say about Thirteen (and I believe I'm done—okay, one more, maybe I kind of wish Pacino went hammier, though he's not objectively un-hammy), and the thing with Damon is just flat bad (and placed so that we're in the endgame already, so it has a disproportionate impact), it is, overall, a blast. I've spoken of its style already, and there's always something terrific either onscreen or right around the corner, but this has some really high peaks, every bit as good as the "cool guys don't look at explosions" montage of Eleven and only slightly short of Toulour's laser dance of Twelve; the Ocean's films belong nearly as much to editor Stephen Mirrione as to Soderbergh, so "this Ocean's movie has some great editing" goes without saying, and even something really goofy, like Danny and Rusty befouling the critic's room, is rendered as a neat psychedelic dissolve montage. The centerpiece, though, is surely what happens as our thieves put their plan into action on the casino floor, and Soderbergh has prepared the ground rather diligently, with shot design that often prefigures it in its insistence on frames-within-frames and, specifically, shadowboxes framed by blaring solid color, so that you very much have to notice it. But for the third act kick-off, we get a very brawny splitscreen collage sequence, straight out of a very specific 1966-1968 corridor, that's intoxicating in its informational density and geometric layout, practically serving as an open question why we ever stopped using such a fun technique. It's the perfect way to visualize a plot like this, which involves three fully independent capers, and a master plan to take the adversary apart from every angle.
It's not even my favorite thing in the movie: when we get to it, we get to it, but things culminate in what I'm sure would sound rather cheesy (yes, moreso than an extended splitscreen sequence, you vile hater), but turns out to be an inordinately effective and even ecstatic way to visualize the transcendent pleasure of beating the house at their own game. So it's the slightest slip downward from its predecessors, and I certainly don't know if it fulfills any of the goals you'd associate with the end of a "trilogy" (it's extremely grudging about allowing Linus as much of a Luke Skywalker send-off as he gets), but it's not like it has to, or like I even want it to. For my money, they could've made as many more of these as they felt like, and if that's not a very fine compliment for a second sequel, I don't know what is.
Score: 9/10
*This isn't the meta one, but there could be something there.
Reviews in this series:
Ocean's 11 (1960)
Ocean's Eleven (2001)
Ocean's Twelve (2004)
Ocean's Thirteen (2007)
Ocean's Eight (2018)
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