Review: Ocean's 8 Can't Multitask Or Plan Ahead
- Jun 15, 2018
- 2 min read
Ocean's Eleven may not have been the perfect heist movie, and Ocean's Twelve may have been even less perfect, but at least they were fun and well orchestrated. Alright, let's get this over with.
Debbie Ocean (Sandra Bullock) is released from prison with a plan, and recruits best friend Lou (Cate Blanchett) to help her plot her heist. They recruit a seven-strong team of women and plan to steal a necklace worth $150 million by convincing Daphne Kluger (Anne Hathaway) to wear it to the star-studded Met Gala. But, ripped from the pages of the Ocean's Eleven script, it becomes apparent that Debbie is using this heist for revenge against ex-boyfriend Claude Becker (Richard Armitage).
While the heist plays like any other Ocean's heist, it's seriously lacking the element of fun. Issues are dealt with as soon as they come up, rather than over time, so there's never any real stakes. To add to that, the initial trilogy was about eleven fallible men. But the 2018 narrative of O8 called for empowered women, who are subsequently depicted as infallible at their particular skill, so there never seems to be any risk that they'll stuff up what they're doing.
And speaking of the empowered women, I found the film to be sexist rather than liberating. The male cast of the original never really did anything gender-specific - they drank a fair bit and goofed around a bit, but the characters' genders could basically be interchangeable. But Ocean's 8 is about diamonds, fashion, and the men in Debbie's life. There's no female empowerment behind it, and from square one, this movie reduces its characters to shallow, artificial people. Sarah Paulson plays little more than a suburban housewife, Anne Hathaway's Daphne is vapid, vain, and vacuous (until one scene near the end when she expresses some uncharacteristic intelligence), and Nine Ball (Rihanna) is an unlikeable two-dimensional caricature.
It doesn't help at all that Cate Blanchett cannot pick an accent. It's not just bad - it actually changes between a distinctly Australian accent in some scenes, and a completely American accent in others. At least Don Cheadle's accent in the original trilogy was consistently bad.
I also have a serious problem with both of the major twists - both completely out of the blue, neither of them adding significantly to the story. Rather, they seem forced in to create a happier ending. It illustrates the flawed pacing of the film - the heist isn't introduced until halfway through the film, and then the story basically ends 20 minutes before the movie does. Additionally, the slow burn setup of the heist means that there's absolutely no excitement or fun throughout.
Ocean's 8 spends too much time teasing returning characters who never do, introducing characters who aren't that well thought-out, and over-explaining the aftershock of their heist. The time could be better spent making the process more fun and lively, or refining the ending by introducing the elements earlier. But instead, Ocean's 8's one-thing-after-another strategy feels like a product of a child with autism who likes to put things in alphabetical order, or keep his mashed potatoes separate from his carrots and his comedy.
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