a guilt-free good time is that the bad guys are really good guys; they like to throw envelopes of money at the smallest fish — the Mexican hotel worker, the thwarted Vegas call girl — while taking down the big tunas. This Robin Hood tale gets the kinetic treatment from director Steven Soderbergh whipping through the genre, dropping split screens and montages all over the place. Soderbergh cares less here than he did with or — praise be; he’s free of his own pretensions — but not quite enough to match the wondrous originality of his best work, and sex, lies and videotape In tribute to Vegas’s faded past, and to Reuben on his deathbed, the crew puts together a plan to undo The Bank Hotel — a gigantic, five-star Twizzler in the sky.
Leading up to one glorious opening night, the team attempts to take out Bank’s Trumpian fantasy table by table, room by room, each according to his talents. Casey Affleck does a nice turn organizing a revolution among die-makers in Mexico; Don Cheadle waits out a rote part as a techie in anticipation of one frothy scene as the new Evel Knievel; Matt Damon flits funnily beneath a prosthetic nose, though he’s trapped too long in a humiliating scene with Bank’s “cougar” assistant (Ellen Barkin, sandblasted by Botox). Bernie Mac, Scott Caan and Carl Reiner loiter forgetfully on the edges, victims of the population surge that’s taken the crew from 11 to 13.
Instead of bogging down the script with a love affair, Soderbergh finally acknowledges that the most interesting and enduring romance in the franchise is between the two leads, perhaps the biggest names in Hollywood. Walking through the city, hands in their flattering flat-fronted pants, Danny and Rusty fill the spaces between plotting with observations about unnamed lovers. It’s a bid to the audience, saying: We know how absurdly interested you are in us.
These winks are mostly quick enough not to be irksome, until Danny tells Rusty (or shall we say, Clooney tells Pitt), “You should settle down, have a couple of kids.” Just because I care about who you’re dating doesn’t make me proud that I care. In a movie about cool, pandering to the US magazine crowd just isn’t.
a guilt-free good time is that the bad guys are really good guys; they like to throw envelopes of money at the smallest fish — the Mexican hotel worker, the thwarted Vegas call girl — while taking down the big tunas.
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