Ocean’s Thirteen, PG, 122mins

Of all the guilty summer pleasures Ocean’s Thirteen is the easiest to forgive. You know the score. George Clooney and Brad Pitt assemble the usual suspects to shaft the coldest shark in the gambling business. And they don’t come much more toothy than Al Pacino. Al is Mr Dubai. He makes greed look old-fashioned. His spanking high-rise casino in Vegas is a cash-making obscenity. In fact it’s the eighth wonder of the world.

His only mistake is to double-cross an old-fashioned fruit called Reuben (Elliott Gould), whom no one actually remembers from either Ocean’s Eleven or Twelve.

Aargh. While Reuben dribbles into his hospital pillow, Danny Ocean (Clooney) and trusty Rusty (Pitt) hit Pacino where it hurts: his pocket.

The running joke of this franchise, which started life as a nostalgic homage to Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack and their original Ocean’s Eleven (1960), is that there is indeed something called honour among thieves. “You shook Sinatra’s hand” is the constant refrain. Pacino is the implicit culprit: he can’t pretend the code never existed.

Ocean’s Thirteen is a genre film that champions grace, manners, and what life is apparently like for Mexicans on a fiver a week. The nostalgia is so selective that I doubt many will actually care. Brad and George lean over a stone railing at midnight riffing about whatever happened to the Sands, the Desert Inn and the Dunes. “This town has changed,” muses Clooney. So have films.

Steven Soderbergh, the director of this, as well as of the other two movies in the modern franchise, is in a hurry. He harks back to the split-screen tricks that made him an indie directing star for Sex, Lies and Videotape.

In Ocean’s Thirteen he films a safe-cracking sequence that cost millions a second. The action is breathtaking, and tooth-grindingly tense.

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