No drop in Ocean

Director: Steven Soderbergh, 12A, 122 mins

Stars: George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Al Pacino, Matt Damon

It’s one of the smuggest franchises in cinema, but it’s also a guilty pleasure to watch. You know the score. Soderbergh gathers the usual suspects around Clooney and Pitt ( above, with Damon) and they pull off an impossible heist. But to make them look good they need a chunky villain, and they don’t come much chillier than Pacino.

His spanking new high-rise casino in Vegas is a cash-making obscenity. But far worse is the fact that he has double-crossed that old-fashioned fruit, Reuben (Elliot Gould), who is forced to retire to his hospital bed while Ocean and the trusty Rusty figure out how to hit Pacino where it hurts: namely his pockets, and his diamonds.

The running joke of this franchise, which started life as a nostalgic homage to Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack, is that there is, indeed, something called honour among thieves. “You shook Sinatra’s hand” is a constant refrain, and the accusation levelled against Pacino. Revenge is tremendous fun. This is a genre film that champions grace and manners. But it is also fiendishly clever. Soderbergh is a sort of grown-up version of Quentin Tarantino. There are reminders of what life is l ike on a fiver a week, but the five-star nostalgia of this perfect crime is so gorgeous that I doubt that many will notice.

Pitt and Clooney lean over a railing by a man-made canal riffing about the passage of time. “The town has changed,” muses Clooney. So too have films. And this is Soderbergh’s point: that fiendishly clever new gadgets – be they cameras or safecrackers – can work with old-fashioned morals (and old-fashioned films) to brilliant effect.

There is a 1960s split-screen sequence as Ocean’s thirteen go about their business on the opening night of Pacino’s casino. Moments that must have cost millions are thrown around like confetti. A scene in which Clooney and Pitt weep in a hotel suite while watching Oprah Winfrey gushing over orphans is quite simply sublime. Soderbergh’s sophisticated humour has never looked so fresh and sharp. He is too clever and subtle a director to let anyone forget that he has loyalties himself. The quirky mix of English and American actors and accents is quite deliberate. They are, of course, Soderbergh’s friends as much as Danny Ocean’s.

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