You gotta love a heist movie. I saw The Sting the day it opened, Christmas 1973, and from that day to this I’m not sure I’ve ever had a better time in a movie theater. But The Sting is to heist pictures what the Bible is to religion. What about other such pictures? Oh, there are so many good ones. Diggstown? Fantastic. Skin Game? Top-notch. Rififi? Wonderful. Topkapi? Can’t beat it. Even The Pink Panther and The Return of the Pink Panther, both primarily epics of slapstick, feature some wonderful hyperplanned thief hijinks.
The question posed by the release of Ocean’s 8—the new distaff heist picture starring Oscar winners Sandra Bullock and Cate Blanchett trying hard to have cool-as-a-cucumber fun in the vein of the George Clooney-Matt Damon Ocean’s movies—is this: Are you gonna love a heist movie that’s only just okay?
Bullock is Debbie, a con artist who’s just been released after nearly six years in the clink—so of course she’s raring to assemble a crew and pull off a new job. She learned her criminal trade from her (supposedly) late brother Danny, who did the same for Ocean’s Eleven and its sequels. So while she was educated in thievery by a man, she doesn’t want to work with any men. There’s a line of dialogue that explains why, but I forget what it was, so it must not have been clever.
The desideratum is a gigantic diamond necklace that has been sitting in a Cartier vault for half a century because nobody knows what to do with it. Debbie Ocean’s plan is to have it brought out of the vault, hung on the neck of a celebrity, and paraded through New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it could be stealthily removed from the celebrity’s neck. Now, this seems a little bit of a ripoff since another heist movie, The Thomas Crown Affair with Pierce Brosnan, was set there too. But to be fair, Brosnan was trying to steal a painting during business hours while looking like the Magritte guy with the apple in front of his face. The Ocean’s 8 heist takes place during the annual Met Gala, known to one and all as the evening during which every famous woman in the world wears a fancy dress for no good reason except that Anna Wintour demands it of them.
Bullock’s crew features her old teammates Blanchett (who now runs a hip club—yawn) and Sarah Paulson (who is a suburban mother—oh my God she’s in hell, I tell you, hell). They recruit a brilliant hacker (Rihanna) whose teenage sister (Nathanya Alexander) is a brilliant metallurgist—don’t ask me how that’s possible except that the plot needs it. There’s a wacky pickpocket (Awkwafina) and a jeweler (Mindy Kaling). And there’s a dress designer on her uppers played by Helena Bonham Carter.
The crew needs to get Anne Hathaway, the gala’s star, to hire Bonham Carter to make her dress, and get Bonham Carter to persuade Hathaway to ask Cartier for the loan of the giant necklace. The night of the gala finds the crew all over the Met, doing devious and clever things, much of it made possible by the advent of the 3D printer.
And here’s the central problem with Ocean’s 8: The stakes are very low here. Everything just works too smoothly. There’s almost no conflict. In both the original 1960 Ocean’s 11 (featuring Sinatra and the Rat Pack) and the Clooney remake, the gang was squaring off against a ruthless Vegas kingpin. In Ocean’s 8 there’s no threat whatsoever from anyone to our heroines. Remember in The Sting that halfway through the picture, Robert Redford is forced to turn on his fellow con man Paul Newman—adding a layer of potentially tragic drama to the proceedings. Here, everyone in Debbie Ocean’s crew is too busy modeling the unlimited joys of close female friendships to plan any kind of double cross.
There’s also one gigantic plot hole involving someone in the crew getting an extraordinarily desirable job for no good reason whatever. If she doesn’t get the job, the heist can’t work. We’re told Debbie Ocean was planning the heist for five years. How could she know there would be this key job opening and that her crew member would get it?
Ocean’s 8 is a kind of heist in itself: It steals your money and then runs off before you realize it didn’t get the job done. Even so, I gotta admit, you kinda gotta love it.
