GRACEFUL 8
Stars shine in new Ocean’s movie
★★★★
Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett
After five years, eight months and 12 days inside, Debbie Ocean – sister to the almost certainly deceased Danny – is home in New York City. She has $45 in her pocket, but a quick bout of almost plausible larceny soon has her suited, booted and reclining in a suite of the Peninsula Hotel on 5th Ave, calling up old friends and putting into action a plan she has been perfecting during all those nights in solitary.
Along with a hand-picked crew of specialists and fellow-desperados, Debbie Ocean is going to walk out of the Met Gala – the single biggest night in Manhattan’s social calendar – with a $150 million dollar bauble that once graced the endangered necks of French nobility.
Sandra Bullock – as Ocean – Cate Blanchett and Anne Hathaway are the core of the cast, with Rihanna, Helena BonhamCarter, Sarah Paulson, Awkwafina and Mindy Kaling all doing far more than just making up the numbers.
Ocean’s 8 is neither a sequel nor reboot to the Steven Soderbergh, George Clooney/ Brad Pitt trilogy. It is a standalone film gaining a bit of box office traction from the name recognition. And good luck to it.
8 succeeds on its own terms, with enough beats in common with its blokeish forebears to be a part of the family, but enough freshness in its kaupapa to feel new, independent and very welcome.
It was only walking home through the Auckland drizzle that I realised, musing back over the plot, that there hadn’t been a single gun, punch or any act of violence at all committed in the film. And yet it still ticked every box as a good-natured, slightly cartoonish heist thriller.
The cast, of course, is terrific. Bullock is utterly the star of the show, and Blanchett has the good grace to dim her own wattage to let Bullock shine. But Hathaway, BonhamCarter and Rihanna all also succeed in carving out engaging and individual characters.
What the film lacks – maybe – is an antagonist we fear might actually derail and crush our spunky wa¯ hine. Andy Garcia in Eleven looked to have the measure of Clooney and crew, and brought just enough gimlet-eyed menace to make us forget momentarily that this was a fun film and of course our heroes would eventually triumph. 8 lacks an equivalent character.
When James Corden – surprisingly effective as an insurance investigator with a nose for a con – comes off the bench for a late cameo, the elevation in tension is palpable. But until that moment, Ocean’s 8 has been trading in something other than just the rudimentary mechanics of plot.
I mentioned earlier that there is no violence in Ocean’s 8 (unless you count spiking a bowl of soup with laxative). The characters drive their scheme with guile and constant awareness of how the men around them will act in response to what they think they are seeing. It’s an insightful and deceptively subtle piece of writing.
Early on, when asked why she won’t have any men on her crew, Debbie Ocean replies, ‘‘men get seen, women don’t. For once, that’s how we want it.’’ It’s a telling line.
If I had to rate the films in order of enjoyment, I’d put Ocean’s 8 just behind Eleven and streets ahead of the self-congratulatory and smug Twelve and Thirteen.
And if the hints that Clooney’s Danny might still be alive have a purpose, and that purpose is a teaming up of Bullock and Clooney for Ocean’s Two, then I’ll happily be queuing for a ticket.