Male delivery

Matt Damon, left, George Clooney, centre, and Brad Pitt are back oozing celebrity cool in Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's Thirteen. (Warner Bros. Pictures)

A man named Willie Bank is unlikely to shower a homeless person with coinage, unless he’s curious to see how much bruising he can induce. As if the character’s true nature weren’t evident enough by his nomenclature, Bank, the villainous casino honcho at the hub of Ocean’s 13, is played by Al Pacino with a keyboard of tight little teeth that look they’ve been filed gnawing the bones of his enemies. Bank is the nefarious force that reunites Danny Ocean (George Clooney) and his crew of high-styling, moralistic gangsters.

Ocean’s 12 choked on its own Hollywood meta-ness: the gang even shot segments at Clooney’s Italian villa, deigning to utter a line or two between wine-haze siestas. And Julia Roberts winkingly played Julia Roberts, which is two Julia Robertses too many. Thankfully, Ocean’s 13 grounds the crew in Vegas and pares down to something leaner and less self-important, a minor, just-charming-enough diversion for the summer months.

Bank made a fatal error when he messed with Reuben (Elliot Gould), spiritual leader to the Ocean squad, a position perhaps granted to anyone whose face doesn’t collapse under the weight of eyeglasses as big as manhole covers. The two were partners on a deal to build the shiniest, newest casino in Vegas, but Bank sliced Reuben out, violating the film’s pop-culture code of ethics. “But we both shook Sinatra’s hand!” shouts Reuben, literally heartbroken as he collapses of something cardiac.

Sinatra, of course, was the star of the original 1960 film Ocean’s 11. It has aged better in the imagination than on screen. Bloated and endless, the only thing that keeps the first Ocean’s 11 sacred in the eyes of devotees is the film’s much-imitated hipster style. With Sinatra and the rat pack strutting through Vegas, Ocean’s 11 is the source of every “You’re money, baby,” uttered since; the original convergence of sweat-free alpha male power and metrosexual shopping savvy. In the modern Ocean’s, the fashionisters know their wine, their Asian languages and their drills and polymers, all necessary tools for whatever scheme is at hand. When Eddie Izzard, as a go-to tinkerer, is brought from England to help undo a massive artificial intelligence-based security system at Bank’s casino, he mocks the men’s retro-cool: “You’re analog players in a digital world.”

But the bump and grind of old and new is the fun of the thing. Danny and his number 2, Rusty (Brad Pitt, content to kick back and savour his physical perfection, as are we), know the glory of a well-fitted jacket, but they’re also gangster brainiacs mourning the loss of the old ways. It’s hard to think of old Las Vegas as deserving of UNESCO world heritage site protection, but the film’s nostalgia is mildly convincing; Clooney pulls off a certain wistfulness for a simple game of blackjack in a pre-Celine desert town.

Ellen Barkin, in the fuchsia dress, and Al Pacino, centre, let the chips fall in Ocean's Thirteen. (Warner Bros. Pictures)

What makes Ocean’s a guilt-free good time is that the bad guys are really good guys; they like to throw envelopes of money at the smallest fish — the Mexican hotel worker, the thwarted Vegas call girl — while taking down the big tunas. This Robin Hood tale gets the kinetic treatment from director Steven Soderbergh whipping through the genre, dropping split screens and montages all over the place. Soderbergh cares less here than he did with Solaris or The Good German — praise be; he’s free of his own pretensions — but not quite enough to match the wondrous originality of his best work, The Limey and sex, lies and videotape. 

In tribute to Vegas’s faded past, and to Reuben on his deathbed, the Ocean’s crew puts together a plan to undo The Bank Hotel — a gigantic, five-star Twizzler in the sky. Leading up to one glorious opening night, the team attempts to take out Bank’s Trumpian fantasy table by table, room by room, each according to his talents. Casey Affleck does a nice turn organizing a revolution among die-makers in Mexico; Don Cheadle waits out a rote part as a techie in anticipation of one frothy scene as the new Evel Knievel; Matt Damon flits funnily beneath a prosthetic nose, though he’s trapped too long in a humiliating scene with Bank’s “cougar” assistant (Ellen Barkin, sandblasted by Botox). Bernie Mac, Scott Caan and Carl Reiner loiter forgetfully on the edges, victims of the population surge that’s taken the crew from 11 to 13.

Instead of bogging down the script with a love affair, Soderbergh finally acknowledges that the most interesting and enduring romance in the franchise is between the two leads, perhaps the biggest names in Hollywood. Walking through the city, hands in their flattering flat-fronted pants, Danny and Rusty fill the spaces between plotting with observations about unnamed lovers. It’s a bid to the audience, saying: “We know how absurdly interested you are in us.” These winks are mostly quick enough not to be irksome, until Danny tells Rusty (or shall we say, Clooney tells Pitt), “You should settle down, have a couple of kids.” Just because I care about who you’re dating doesn’t make me proud that I care. In a movie about cool, pandering to the US magazine crowd just isn’t.

Ocean’s 13 opens across Canada June 8.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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