Too much scamming, not enough style
Ocean’s 8 boasts charismatic all-female cast, but it’s less like Mission: Impossible and more like Caper: Ridiculous in its plot
Ocean’s 8boasts a charismatic all-female cast led by Sandra Bullock and Cate Blanchett, but it’s just like all-male heist pictures when it comes to the feasibility of its plot. Which is to say it’s less Mission: Impos
sible and more Caper: Ridiculous, with contrivance piled upon coincidence in its elaborate diamond-theft narrative to the point where even the most generous viewer may lose patience.
Blame advancing technology for diminishing criminal credibility. Frank Sinatra didn’t have to worry about computerized vault locks and high-definition surveillance cameras when he played master conman Danny Ocean in the original Ocean’s 11 in 1960. And the digital age was still in its infancy in 2001 when George Clooney assumed the role, for a remake that turned into an Ocean’s trilogy, each film directed by Steven Soderbergh.
Danny Ocean’s men also had a real sense of style to their scamming, something that his like-minded sister Debbie Ocean (Bullock) and her team somewhat lack.
It’s easy to roll with plot inanities when the heisters are cool enough to make you not want to sweat the details.
Ocean’s 8 is downright dowdy about its duping, which is surprising considering the heist is about stealing a Cartier diamond necklace worth $150 million and replacing it with a zirconium copy worth considerably less. And the theft is happening not inside the Vegas casinos of Ocean’s past, but rather at New York’s annual Met Gala, which we’re remind- ed is the most stylish and highfalutin’ affair in America.
Far too much of the tale involves unglamorous drudgery, such as the camera placement outside a washroom (to create a necessary “blind spot”) and the serving of food in the Met kitchen. The main meeting spot for Debbie, her crime partner Lou (Blanchett) and the rest of the Ocean’s 8 crew resembles generic warehouse hangouts seen in countless gangster movies.
A toilet and projectile vomiting also factor into a film that favours backrooms over ballrooms.
I suppose you could call this “keeping it real,” but it seems a poor use by writer/director Gary Ross ( The Hunger Games) and his co-screenwriter Olivia Milch of the fashionable premise and the fabulous cast. Even the soundtrack misses the point, noisily shifting from what sounds like mixtapes labelled “Frathouse Kegger” to “Suburban Jazz Sampler.” What makes Ocean’s 8 worth a look in spite of its deficiencies is the amusement of teaming Bullock and Blanchett with Anne Hathaway, Mindy Kaling, Rihanna, Helena Bonham Carter, Sarah Paulson and Awkwafina. Together they possess enough chemistry — and character skills that include hacker, pickpocket, jeweler, designer and more — to make you wish Steven Soderbergh rather than Gary Ross had been at the helm of the movie.
It’s fun watching these women figure out how to execute a plan that newly paroled ex-con Debbie cooked up during her “five years, eight months and12 days, give or take” in the slammer.
If only Debbie’s scheming had included more character definition, although Hathaway glit- ters as diva actress Daphne Kluger, who will be wearing the aforementioned Cartier jewels that the other women are plotting to snatch right off her elegant neck. And what of the men of Ocean’s 8? They’re few in number and mainly relegated to an awkward third act in which James Corden plays a dogged insurance sleuth and Richard Armitage a caddish exboyfriend, the latter figuring into a romantic score-settling subplot filched from Soderbergh’s Ocean’s 11.
Too bad Ocean’s 8 didn’t steal more of Soderbergh’s swagger.