MANILA, Philippines - "Ocean's Thirteen" is a fun caper and has a lot of heart, too, because Danny Ocean and his gang mates have embarked on their latest complicated scheme to avenge the betrayal of their beloved mentor (Elliott Gould) by a vicious hotel-casino lord (Al Pacino). Trouble is, the fun soon gets tedious, as Steven Soderbergh's latest sequel turns out to be long on clever details but short on interesting, revealing plotting. In fact, the film sometimes feels more like a crime documentary rather than a feature film as the action slows down to give way to detailed schemes that take a long time to set up.
Of course, once the elaborate plan is finally put into play, everything happens fast and furiously, and the film revs up to a truly astonishing finale. How clever Ocean and his avenging brothers in crime are! The problem isn't with the movie's slam-bang denouement, it's with the minutes and minutes of relatively static "planning" and "planting" scenes that precede it.
Let's hope that most action film buffs are patient enough to sit through these relatively slow and low scenes, in the eager expectation of reaping rich rewards later in the film. To be sure, the planning scenes aren't slow and low all the time.
News RSS