GIRLS DON’T WANNA HAVE FUN?
Crime spree from stellar Ocean’s 8 cast fails to include scene stealing,
OCEAN’S 8
★★ ½ out of 5 Cast: Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett, Anne Hathaway Director: Gary Ross
Duration: 1h 50m CHRIS KNIGHT
I think I’ve been conned. When news emerged of an all-female reboot of the Ocean’s franchise — almost 60 years since the Sinatra-Martin-Davis Jr. original, and a decade after the Clooney-Pitt-Damon update — I thought: about time! Hollywood is full of brilliant, funny women, and it didn’t take producers long to round up Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett and Helena Bonham Carter (to name just the B list) as well as Sarah Paulson, Anne Hathaway, Mindy Kaling and two literal one-namers, singer Rihanna and comedian Awkwafina. Or to find a man (director Gary Ross) to keep them in line.
I’m kidding with that last remark. But not when I say: Why isn’t Ocean’s 8 more fun?
It starts off amusingly enough. Debbie Ocean gets out of jail — just like her brother Danny in the last go-round — and immediately goes back to her old ways, cleaning out a cosmetics counter and getting a classy hotel to comp her a suite, all with such ease you might be tempted to try it yourself. Except remember: She’s Sandra Bullock, and you’re not. Far from wasting away in prison, Ocean was busy concocting the perfect heist, one that would net her and her collaborators millions of dollars apiece while framing a man innocent of the crime but guilty of crossing Ocean in the past. She first calls on her old buddy Lou (Blanchett), and eventually rounds up the usual suspects — a hacker, a pickpocket, a diamond expert, a fence, a designer and an unwitting accomplice, the last played by Hathaway in a nice send-up of her own celebrity. Granted, this all takes a little longer than it should, and the planning phase — the heist will take place during a gala dinner at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art — is unnecessarily padded with touristy shots of the institute’s various Egyptian antiquities, Vermeers by Rubens, etc. Also, is there a rule that every heist movie needs a miniature model of the target, someone unexpectedly fluent in another language and a scene in which data is downloaded one agonizing per cent at a time? And if there is, shouldn’t Ocean’s 8 be precisely the movie to break that rule? Oddly, the story gets the most traction after the heist has occurred. James Corden shows up as a breezy insurance investigator and, like Chris Hemsworth in 2016’s Ghostbusters, steals every scene he’s in. There’s also a nifty sequence near the end that operates as a kind of sequel within the movie, which is a great time saver. But the characters never mesh, interact or just plain relax as much as we might want. A story like this needs more eccentricities, more tics and tells among its cast. Remember how Brad Pitt was eating in almost every scene of Ocean’s 11? Sure, this one has Bonham Carter’s wonky Irish accent, which ranges from Ballycastle to Killarney, and occasionally wanders into the Atlantic. And we too-briefly meet a few of the thieves’ family members. But the sense of professionalism is palpable. It’s as though the cast worried we’d balk if they looked like they were enjoying themselves too much. There are still scattered islands of fun to be found in Ocean’s 8, but it’s an attenuated archipelago. I’m recalling Bullock’s pep talk to the team: “Somewhere out there is an eight-year-old girl lying in bed dreaming of being a criminal. Let’s do this for her.” And somewhere, another eight-year-old girl is dreaming of being a filmmaker. Ocean’s 8 won’t be the kick of inspiration she needs, unless the message she takes away is: You can do better than this.