Gary Ross’s all-female spin on the Ocean’s films is glossy, good-natured and almost entirely without danger. The cast is a pleasure, Anne Hathaway especially, and the heist itself is neatly built; it is what surrounds it that has been left slack.
Gary Ross has taken the Ocean’s films, the three Steven Soderbergh directed between 2001 and 2007, and handed them to eight women. Debbie Ocean (Sandra Bullock), Danny’s sister, walks out of prison with a plan to lift a diamond necklace from a film star’s neck at the Met Gala, and what follows keeps the shape you expect: the recruiting, the rehearsal, the night itself, the loose ends. Ross, who wrote it with Olivia Milch, is not trying to do anything to the formula except change who is standing in it. That is a fair ambition, and the film meets it. It meets little else.
Anne Hathaway is the reason to watch. Daphne Kluger is a star who needs to be looked at the way the rest of us need to breathe, and Hathaway plays her as a spoilt child with the manners of an empress, tilting her chin for cameras that are not there and losing interest in anyone the moment they stop flattering her. We laughed out loud, more than once, at nothing more than the way she receives a compliment, as if it were owed and slightly late. It is the one performance in the film with an edge to it, and Hathaway knows exactly how hard to press.
Bullock plays Debbie low and dry, a woman who has done her time and wants the world to notice how patient she has been. Her first afternoon out, talking her way into a department store’s cosmetics and a hotel suite on nerve alone, is the best stretch of pure con in the film. Cate Blanchett’s Lou wears trouser suits and looks amused, and the two have the shorthand of people who have argued about the same things for years. Sarah Paulson is funny as Tammy, a suburban mother with a garage full of stolen goods, and Helena Bonham Carter is winningly frantic as Rose Weil, a designer one bad season from ruin. Awkwafina, Mindy Kaling and Rihanna have less to do and do it pleasantly.
Eigil Bryld shoots New York in clean, bright, expensive light, with none of the amber grime Soderbergh favoured; every surface looks recently polished, which suits a film in which nobody sweats. Sarah Edwards’s costumes do a good deal of the character work, Lou in silk and leather, Debbie in tailored black, Tammy in cardigans, and then the gala floor, where the frocks are the point and are allowed to be. Alex DiGerlando’s interiors are handsome and a little anonymous. Daniel Pemberton supplies a brassy, walking-bass score that keeps promising a swagger the direction never delivers. Juliette Welfling cuts the planning as brisk montage and the heist itself with real clarity, so we always know which woman is where and what the next problem is.
The trouble is that nothing pushes back. A heist needs somebody on the other side of it, and this one offers a security system, some guards and, late on, James Corden as an insurance investigator who is more amused than alarmed. Richard Armitage’s Claude Becker, the art dealer who put Debbie away, is set up as her reason for all of this and then barely used. Because every step of the plan works, the middle of the film is pleasant in the way a well-run dinner is pleasant, and about as tense. The last half hour adds business we will not describe. It does not raise the temperature.
Somewhere past the hour we noticed we had stopped minding whether they got away with it, because nobody on screen seemed to mind either. We were not bored. We were unbothered, and a heist film that leaves you unbothered has lost the one thing it cannot do without.
Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven (2001) had the same low stakes and got away with them because it moved: quick cuts, hot colours, a cast plainly enjoying one another. Ross, whose Pleasantville (1998) and Seabiscuit (2003) were careful, warm and unhurried, directs this the same way, and a caper cannot afford to be careful. The women are having a good time. The camera stands at a respectful distance and watches them have it.
It runs 111 minutes and carries a 12A, and it will do for an evening when you want good company and nothing to worry about. Watch it for Hathaway, for the frocks, and for the twenty minutes on the gala floor, which is the only stretch where the film moves as fast as the women in it.
