Kicking It With George and Brad

One of the major pleasures of 2001's Ocean's Eleven was that it looked like it was just a heck of a lotta fun to make. Ocean's Eleven was not a great movie, but it knew what it was, and that's harder than it sounds. The sequel departs from its source in many Soderberghian ways, not least the jump cuts, hand helds, freeze frames and underlighting. The heist, so meticulously planned and executed in many a film of this genre, is decidedly secondary. And again, the actors look like their having a great ol' time.

The thing that makes it an absolutely successful sequel is that it unabashedly embraces its own weirdness. Lines are tossed off like the actors will dub in something less tangential later. Example: midway through the film, for little discernable reason, there is a brief discussion of the forest execution scene from Miller's Crossing. The exact exchange didn't stick in my mind--it came out of nowhere and was gone before I knew what was happening. "I cry every time," is how Eliot Gould, whose main responsibility on the heist appears to be lounging around in an open robe, ends the discussion. Why is this in the movie? I couldn't tell you. But purely as a riff of dialogue between George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Gould, it works. It's no big thing. I assume one must work hard to make it look so easy, but it's hard to tell.