Ocean's Eleven
At a glance...
- Directed by Steven Soderbergh
- Released in 2001
- Runtime 116 minutes
- Watched at home
- Final feelings: So fun and so dated, a time capsule of a film.
Watched this on repeat at some point in my adolescence because I desperately wanted to believe there was a type of man I could be that was cool and desirable. Turns out, outside of the writer's room it's really hard to communicate with silence and cool looks. I did practice eating cheeseburgers like Brad Pitt does in this film and maybe that's why I've got TMJ problems now.
Jokes aside, this is still a banger, even though it feels quaint watching it in 2024, like I'm looking in a beautifully engineered diorama. Ocean's Eleven doesn't feel especially novel (probably because everyone is still imitating it), but it does still feel tight and precise. The characters are memorable and while the distribution of screentime isn't shared as equally as the take is, every moment with each person uses its time well to make all these guys distinct (maybe with exception to the acrobat, Yen, who just stands around looking Chinese a lot of the time). Terry Benedict is maybe the most understated version of the antagonist in this film, but I think it's fine here. Let the little convicts and con-men have the glory, and the villain can just smolder to himself and his own ego. It's fun! These guys are fun!
Not just fun, these guys are cool. I feel like a lot has probably been said about the writing in this film, and the extremely minimal forms of communication that are used especially between Rusty and Danny. When they're listing off all the archetypal con-men they'll need and its all just a bunch of famous names in cinema and music, it feels so cool. Like, you don't need to know what all these terms of art mean, it's actually because you don't know but the characters speak with such confidence about them that makes it cool. Linus being the new guy is fun and it works because he's never played up as an audience surrogate. Again, the movie is good because it doesn't explain to the audience until right at the end. Letting things be undefined, unknown, and maybe confusing, until you finally understand in the final flourish of the film. That's how you get actually memorable cool-ness. It can't just be quips and snark!
I do think there's a future essay maybe not only about this film but including this film that charts the progression of how surveillance was imagined/depicted in mainstream action/neo-noir type movies in the 00's, from this to The Dark Knight and beyond. This movie plays up the surveillance aspect as a novel thing, which it probably was at the time. 20+ years after the Patriot Act and now surveillance is so normalized we put it on our front doors by default. Everyone is constantly being policed by home surveillance that is directly accessible by your local police department, every phone is a built-in surveillance machine sending you targeted ads and containing backdoors for the Feds if you ever support the worng people or make the wrong kind of noise. But in 2001 you could make a movie where 90% of the heist is enabled by one guy routing one cable through a middleman and it was incredible. The convicts are using the house's tools to steal from the house. There was a world of possibility for "hacking", stealing, crime, in the era that made this movie. If the right people did it, if the right people turned the cameras on and used it to take down one dude, if the right people broke the rules, it wasn't just good, it was good fun!
But that has now been co-opted. In today's world Danny Ocean is not a criminal, he's not a convict, he's a guy in an office in Virginia sorting through petabytes of surveillance data to add names to the no-fly list, to take down pro-Palestinian activists, Black Lives Matter activists, and so on. Maybe what these movies really did was just normalize that if the target is right, the surveillance is alright, and 20+ years of marketing means your favorite police department is Ocean's 11, and the wrong people in your neighborhood are Terry Benedict. I don't even think this is a stretch, this is just what mass surveillance is literally for now, and in a way movies like this in the post 9-11 era played a part in normalizing that idea.
Anyway, the dudes in this movie should have been gay for each other. Is Ocean's 12 the one where they introduce the concept of homosexuality to the team?