Ocean In The Desert-George Clooney And Brad Pitt’s “Ocean’s Eleven” (2001)-A Film Review 

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

Ocean’s Eleven, starring George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Andy Garcia, Julia Roberts, 2001 

Let’s face it everybody loves a con, loves a con artist at least since old Herman Melville made a big literary deal out of such characters in his 19^th century novel The Confidence Man . Well everybody loves a con, a con artist as long as that personage is conning somebody else and not one’s good self. Better if the con is on some super-rich guy who made his dough by walking over a pile of people, hell, maybe a pile of corpses. And that latter premise is what makes George Clooney’s remake of the 1960s Frank Sinatra-led classic con story Ocean’s Eleven go the distance.

Here’s how this version played out. Ex-convict Danny Ocean, played by George Clooney, freshly paroled out of prison automatically begins to set in motion the plans he had spent four years in prison working out. (Yeah, not all cons work out and sometimes you face hard time if the caper goes south on you either because the plan had too many moving parts or because once you knew you couldn’t get all the first-rate accomplices you needed you made the mistake of going for second best-ouch!)With that much time you know Danny has a big score in mind-a plan to get well in a hurry.     

Naturally he needs to grab a crew of reliable cons to work this caper and above his old confederate Rusty Ryan, played by Brad Pitt. For the first part of the film after Danny has tagged Rusty for the caper the play is to line up nine other guys (two and nine makes eleven if my math is right) for the primo caper of capers-knocking over the three biggest casinos in Vegas. Piece of cake. No sweat. The payoff-about a hundred and fifty million a little bit more than walking around money (and many times the take in the Frank Sinatra original where the take was a few million-a lot of dough back in 1960 if only coffee and cakes money these days). Now such a caper seems to me to need no additional hook- I know I would be in if asked. But see Danny is a thoughtful reflective type and so he had pitched the idea to an ex-casino owner with two things in mind. Grab some much needed front money from that casino owner who just so happened to have been stiffed by the owner of those three casinos-Terry Benedict (played by Andy Garcia). Here’s the dicey part, the part tailor-mind to lead to trouble in most cons-Danny is trying to get his long-suffering ex-wife back. An ex-wife Tess, played by Julia Roberts, who did not pine away while Danny was in the can but who now was Terry’s girlfriend. Bad business mixing the love and money combination-no question.            

Not to worry though Danny and the guys have this one mapped out to perfection-have got all the angles covered. In the old days this kind of caper depended on muscle and maybe a few inside job participants. Nowadays though the yeggs and mugs are excess baggage what you need is larcenous guys into high technology to over-match the technology something like the gaming industry can bring to bear to protect their profits. So this caper need guys who can work through the high tech master vault where all the money from the three casinos is centrally located (bringing to mind old bank robber Willie Sutton’s remark about he robbed banks-that is where the dough is so Danny and company are on the right course). Naturally there has to be a few tense moments where the whole thing could fall apart because the usual something unexpected happened but mostly this was clear sailing. Danny and his guys did a good job. And nobody was left crying when Terry lost his dough-and Danny’s ex-wife to boot.