There is, if we’re being honest here, and why wouldn’t we be, really no good reason to watch Ocean’s Thirteen at this point. Its time, to the degree it ever had one, is past, and it has moved squarely into the “Well, I work from home, and there’s nothing else on at noon on a Monday so why don’t I just put on cable and leave whatever is on in the background while I work” category of films, the undisputed king of which is and always will be a little film called Literally Any Harrison Ford Movie, Seriously, Any Single One, It’s Probably On AMC Right Now. I love that movie.
But despite this firm statement about not seeking out Ocean’s Thirteen for any reason, there I was last night flicking through HBO Go at 10:13 PM because I was getting so stressed out by the elect-…
[buzzers and alarms begin going off like crazy in my brain, a team of very tiny workers called the Self-Preservation Unit begin shouting “THIS IS NOT A DRILL. INITIATE SELF-PRESERVATION OVERRIDE!” before pulling a giant lever that sends my thoughts careening away from anything upsetting]
Hmm. No reason, I guess. Not even sure why you’re asking, everything was totally fine. I just really wanted to watch it. Anyway, before I even really knew what happened, I had clicked play. I watched the entire thing, radio silent, which was fine because…
[a computer expert member of the team begins furiously clicking away at a keyboard…]
… nothing else important was going on last night anyway.
With that said, here are a few thoughts I had while watching Ocean’s Thirteen last night:
#1. The plot of Ocean’s Thirteen is totally insane. One of the crew’s old rich guys, Reuben, gets hosed out of a casino deal and left to die mid-heart-attack on the top floor of an unfinished casino by Al Pacino and his goons. So your Clooneys and Pitts and such resolve to settle the score and ruin this Pacino rascal, and their plan involves everything from bedbugs to manmade earthquakes to borderline sexual assault to Mexican worker revolutions to loaded dice. And wigs. So many wigs. And prosthetics. The wig and prosthetics budget on this movie probably explains why this is the only Ocean’s movie without Julia Roberts. They needed that $20 million for Damon’s preposterous schnoz. Authenticity is important.
#2. In order for any of this score-settling to work, Pacino’s character, whose last name is, I swear to God, Bank, and is by his own admission the most powerful man in the history of Nevada, would have had to not recognize Danny Ocean and his cavalcade of heist associates, despite the fact that they very recently stole hundreds of millions of dollars from another casino and are apparently known throughout the world as criminal masterminds. Also, Bank even meets with Danny and references them knowing similar people. And we know that Danny’s name pops up with his whole crew as “known associates” because that’s what happened when their card counter guy got pinched and fingerprinted.
Point being: It would’ve taken Bank like 30 seconds of Googling to realize that the mysterious mustachioed seismologist who looked a lot like Brad Pitt and was selling him an earthquake thingy he had never heard of just days after a notorious criminal vowed to get even with him was, in fact, Brad Pitt. The movie could have ended right there. Bingo Bango. Problem solved.
#3. Speaking of Pacino’s character, his skin in this movie is almost comically orange.
[the Chief of the Preservation Unit raises his hand slightly, as if to tell the staff to wait to take action, but be on their toes]
It’s kind of hilarious. The bad guy in this movie in an egomaniac orange casino owner whose only motivations are greed and power and a borderline pathetic need for validation (in the form of a sparkling review). It’s almost like they’re trying to tell us something. Like it’s such an obvious stand-in for Donald t-
[Chief shouts “OKAY, SHUT IT DOWN.”]
… stand in for… Wow. Lost my train of thought there. I’ll circle back if I remember where I was going.
#4. One of the running themes throughout the movie, as part of Danny’s plot to tank Bank’s precious review, is the ruining of the experience of the actual hotel reviewer. Danny and his crew do this through a number of methods: general rudeness while posing as members of the staff, the aforementioned bedbugs, etc.
All of which is fine and great and also a direct ripoff of the 1992 made for television movie Saved by the Bell: Hawaiian Style, in which the gang ruined the experience of guests at a fancy hotel — the principals group led by Mr. Belding — in an attempt to convince them to leave for the quaint but struggling hotel led by Kelly Kapowski’s grandfather, Harry. Posing as rude staff members? Yup, Jesse plays a mean German maid and Slater plays an incompetent Italian room service delivery person. Bug scares? Yup, Zack and Screech show up as Wayne’s World-sequel exterminators to scare the hell out of everyone.
My point here is that Soderbergh owes Peter Engel some money for lifting his plot.
#5. Actually, now that I think about it, this movie ripped off Hawaiian Style in a bunch of ways. Evil hotel owner ignores the law in an effort to expand. A small group of close friends with a nearly unending supply of disguises try to take him down. The hotel magnate’s trusted number two becomes romantically involved with someone many years their junior*, etc. Pay up, Soderbergh.
*This particular plot is much less unsettling in Ocean’s Thirteen because Ellen Barkin and Matt Damon are both of age and consenting adults, to the degree consent can be given when one party uses some sort of pheromone patch to turn the other into Pepe Le Pew, basically. In Hawaiian Style, a 30-year-old lawyer straight-up seduces a high school junior. How we let any of this happen, I’ll never know. The 90s were weird.
#6. It’s worth noting here that Ellen Barkin’s cleavage was on-screen for enough time that it should have pulled a second paycheck of its own, in addition to whatever the person attached to it was paid. I say this not to be a leering creep. I say this because it was apparently a major part of the film and failing to mention it at all would be a dereliction of my duties as a reporter. I refuse to compromise my integrity like that.
It is also worth noting that despite making three of these movies, each one about a fancy high-end heist, the producers still managed to never cast Pierce Brosnan in one. That is unbelievable to me. I consider it a personal failure. I focused so much of my resources on willing Jason Statham into the Fast & Furious franchise through the power of vibes that I appear to have neglected this equally important task. I will not rest until the wrong has been righted. (I will probably rest.) (A lot.) (But still.)
#7. Between these movies and his recent arc on Ballers, Andy Garcia is now squarely in the middle of the “wealthy villain who smokes cigars and wears ascots” part of his career, and I support it fully.
#8. There’s a brief exchange near the end of the movie where Clooney’s character tells Brad Pitt’s character to settle down and have a couple of kids. At the time, this was a wink at the camera, because Pitt was married to Angelina Jolie and was in the process of adopting children from around the globe, while Clooney was still running around Lake Como with any leggy blonde whose passport was up to date.
But now, in 2016, it’s somehow both a better and a worse joke, because Pitt is going through an ugly divorce with Jolie that has already seen phrases like “child endangerment” thrown around, and Clooney has settled down with his wife Amal, an acclaimed human rights lawyer and activist who has an interesting tie-in to current events because…
[Chief of Self-Preservation Unit addresses staff by saying, “Hang on, let’s see where he’s going with this…”]
… she and George raised a substantial amount of money for Hillary Clinton. But in the past, she has represented Julian Assange of Wikileaks, whose email dumps had an undeniable effect on the 2016 election…
[“Oh God! He’s talking about the emails! Quick, emergency measures. Someone call up the Dr. Ruth tweet! Now! Now!”]
… which many pundits think…
OK so you weren't invited to George Clooney's wedding in Venice. You can still celebrate. Have sex in your bathtub!
— Dr. Ruth Westheimer (@AskDrRuth) September 29, 2014
Heeeyyy! I love that tweet! Sex in the bathtub! Dr. Ruth, you are a delight.
#9. Here’s something you probably knew but is worth mentioning again, and every time it can be shoehorned into a conversation. Bob Einstein, who plays some sort of federal agent until it is revealed at the end that SURPRISE he’s secretly Matt Damon’s character’s dad, is probably best known by people in my age group as Super Dave Osborne, the fake daredevil character he portrayed for much of the early 90s. He is also the brother of Albert Brooks. This leads to two very important realizations:
- Albert Brooks and Super Dave Osborne are brothers
- Albert Brooks’ real name is Albert Einstein
Never forget those two facts.
#10. One of my favorite games to play with any action movie is a little something I call, “Imagine if the 24-hour news channels covered the events of the film.” The best examples of this are probably the Transformers or Avengers movies, or any movie involving superhumans or robots from space coming to Earth and leveling entire cities. Pacific Rim is a good one, too. But Ocean’s Thirteen is a sleeper fun example, especially once the investigation reveals that someone triggered an artificial earthquake in the middle of Las Vegas to pull off a helicopter-enabled diamond heist on the roof of the brand new building owned by the city’s most powerful casino mogul. Just picture that coverage. Picture Wolf Blitzer trying to explain all of that from his Situation Room.
I mean, assuming CNN would even cut away from its cabal of talking heads for two seconds to cover A REAL STORY like a CASINO HEIST instead of whatever GODDAMN TANGENTIAL AT BEST NARRATIVE THEY WANT TO PUSH ABOUT SOMETHING AS IMPORTANT AS ELECTING A PRESID-…
[Chief of Self-Preservation Unit smashes glass and mashes the “Only Use In Case of Emergency Button”]
… ENT. AND ANOTHER TH-…
Hey, you know what was a good song? “Twisted” by Keith Sweat. Well, I guess that all I have to say today. Bye, guys.
