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Three's the charm for this summer sequel. "Ocean's Thirteen," the third movie in a series that started with a remake of the Frank Sinatra Rat Pack classic "Ocean's Eleven," is still hitting the entertainment jackpot. For just plain old escapist entertainment, it delivers the goods.
Danny Ocean (George Clooney) and his pack of heist meisters are back in Las Vegas with another caper to pull off. This one dispenses with the romantic complications, and has the team focused on righting a wrong, in their own style, after one of their own (Elliot Gould) is ripped off by an unscrupulous casino entrepreneur W. Bank (Al Pacino).
Brad Pitt, Don Cheadle, Bernie Mac, Carl Reiner and Matt Damon are among the returning cast, along with some new faces among the team of high tech, high concept gentleman thieves.
Of course, the team count has to come up to thirteen for this one, although they dispense with the countdown this time. It is just the guys in this one, with no Julia Roberts or Catherine Zeta-Jones on Ocean's team, although casino mogul Pacino's right hand man is a coldly-efficient, fiercely-loyal, corporate tiger of a woman, played by Ellen Barkin.
Ocean's Thirteen is more of an action movie than caper film, but I found this sequel more focused and entertaining than the previous one.
It is lighter and funnier, with loopy, non-sequitur patter, reminiscent of Robert Altman, peppered throughout. George Clooney and Brad Pitt's tongue-in-cheek exchanges are particularly good, but there is plenty of laugh-making throughout.
In a classic caper film, the fun is in figuring out how the thieves are going to pull off the crime, but all that is spelled out up-front in this case.
The suspense is in whether the victim of the heist, the double dealing casino owner, is going to catch on in time and with any of a hundred things that can go wrong.
Along the way we get a workers' revolt in a Mexican factory, a balky card shuffling machine that tends to spew cards at inopportune moments and Matt Damon with a disguise that mostly consists of a prominent nose.
Plenty of spectacular special effects keep action fans entertained, but it is the clever set-ups, the banter, the humor and theme of standing up for your friends that really gives the film its charm.
There is probably no chance that the studio will stop the "Ocean" franchise with this one but it would be a fitting stopping point, as this one it just going to be hard to beat.
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