Double crossed ... Carl Reiner as Saul Bloom and George Clooney as Danny Ocean
When Stephen Soderbergh and co-producer George Clooney were in the planning stages for the Ocean's caper franchise one assumes they must have realised there would come a time when they would find themselves risking the wrath of lady luck by releasing a casino movie with the number 13 in the title. Or maybe they never imagined the series would get this far. There are more than a few critics out there who are pretty upset that it did.
The new film sees the gang returning to their Las Vegas heartland, where original Ocean's Elevener Reuben Tishkoff (Elliott Gould) has been tricked out of his share in a new casino by evil tycoon Willie Bank (Al Pacino), suffering a coronary in the process.
Not all the reviews are bad. The BBC's Stella Papamichael is keen on the chemistry between Clooney, Brad Pitt and the rest of the gang, and points out that "the emphasis on friendship and loyalty makes them easy to root for".
Time's Richard Corliss is less forgiving, however. "The new film is so listless and logy it needed Michael Moore to take it to Cuba for emergency medical treatment," he writes.
Staying in the US, Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times still can't get over the point where the gang "decided to manufacture a fake earthquake to scare all the high-rollers on opening night. How did they plan to do this? Why, by digging under the casino with one of the giant tunnel boring machines used to dig the Chunnel between England and France."
But the prize for most amusingly damning review goes to our own Peter Bradshaw, who reckons that "it's just the tiniest bit better than Ocean's Twelve. To be worse, or as bad, the film would have had to have been a single 122-minute shot of 13 dead haddocks on a slab.".
Given that Mr Bradshaw's review was published on Friday, we're sort of wondering whether any of you bothered to see it. Is anyone willing to own up? And was it really as bad as all that?
