The original Ocean’s 11, from 1960 is one of the laziest movies ever. Frank Sinatra and his “rat pack” pals goof and snooze their way through a nothing movie. But Steven Soderbergh has a serious talent for smart glitzy pop filmmaking, and his sparkly 2001 remake of Ocean’s 11 is playful and witty. Soderbergh then made two more films about Danny Ocean pulling off a great heist, both good enough, and now he’s one of two producers of Ocean’s 8, which is sort of sprightly and alive, but in the way of leftovers revived in the oven more than something with original snap.
This is the women’s version of a caper film, and it does all the usual things. The moment Debby Ocean (Sandra Bullock), sister of Danny, gets out of prison, she’s already plotting to steal a $150 million diamond necklace, and at the same time to take revenge on the guy who put her in prison five years earlier. Debby lines up her crew, including Kate Blanchett and does high-tech stuff like finding an expert to outwit the surveillance systems along with another henchwoman who can make a 3-D printing of the Cartier necklace.
Women in the movies have been saying for a very long time that they can pull off as many kinds of films as can the men. Of course, but Ocean’s 8 proves mostly that women can do a remake. Bullock and Blanchett certainly handle the game as well as George Clooney and Brad Pitt, but Ocean’s 8 is still an imitation. The wit is not a surprise and the crackle feels muffled.
The great old-time Hollywood director Howard Hawks said that if something didn’t work, he’d reverse the terms – he’d play a sober scene for comedy. His best reversal was to take a newspaper story about two men – The Front Page – and make one of the characters a woman. So, His Girl Friday may use the same events as The Front Page, but the sexual tension between an editor and a reporter who were married and are now divorced made for a film twice as good and much funnier.
Ocean’s 8 doesn’t use its women to get something beyond the other Oceans movies. It’s the same old caper film. Just like its brothers, it’s got amusing choreography, clever hand-offs of the jewels, and multiple kickers at the end. The film puts Bullock and Blanchett and their gang in fancy clothing and a chi chi setting – the heist takes place at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, during a major reception for big donors. There’s a fuss over Ann Hathaway’s cleavage. So, the women of Ocean’s 8 look just like the women in the other Ocean’s movies.
Caper pictures have a lot of competition. Topkapi, The Sting or the exquisite 1955 Rififi made in France by the blacklisted American Jules Dassin. Rififi stages one of the greatest robberies in the movies – 33 tense minutes with no talk, just the sight and sound of the robbers breaking into a safe. But the guts of the picture come from what happens to each of the robbers because of pulling off the job. Oceans 8 may be crisp, but there’s nothing underneath the crisp details of the theft.
It may not help that director and co-writer Gary Ross is a man, who’s mostly plugged women actors into the standard slots of male caper movies – the one who doubts, the goof, the techie. Oceans 8 could have let women do women’s jobs. Let them do a different kind of caper. Take the maleness out of the film. Change the tactics; change the goals. Change the motives. Change the settings. The women in Ocean’s 8 are the same women that male filmmakers have imagined for over a hundred years. Ocean’s 8 should think like a woman, not like a man trying to think like a woman.
