MikePadgett.com

Ocean’s Thirteen

— A golden jackpot to help raise the budget for a proper film. Like Las Vegas, this film is loud, garish and steals your money.”

• Director: Steven Soderbergh
• United States, 2007
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From far away you can hear the overhead lines crackling across the desert as they stretch through the arid expanses of Nevada toward the mirage glow of Las Vegas. That crackling, it’s the sound of Messrs Clooney, Pitt, Damon et al phoning their lines in.

If you put a scene’s worth of frames from Soderbergh’s movies on the wall, they’ll look lurid like a Warhol screenprint, so it’s no surprise that the neons of Vegas make Ocean’s Thirteen an orgy of colour and the barely trying cast is obviously as dazzled by the bright artificial as Raoul Duke.

This is a poseur movie for boys and girls who like to watch the boys and girls go by: since while Sinatra, Martino and the junior Davis brylcreemed their way through five casinos royale, these 21st century cruisers of the modern middle age are just too slick to make it stick.