OCEAN'S ELEVEN (2001)

A professional criminal, Danny Ocean (George Clooney), comes up with an idea to simultaneously rob three large casinos in Las Vegas of around 150 million dollars in cold hard cash money duckets cheddar. Naturally, in order to do this, he will need ten of his trendiest and dorkiest friends. You got the one guy with the computers and the other guy who’s good at the thing and the one guy with perhaps the most distractingly bad British accent in movie history. You catch what me drippin', guvna? Oh yeah, the casinos are all owned by the guy (Andy Garcia) who is now long-dicking Ocean’s ex-wife, Julia Roberts. Imagine that.

Every time I sit down to watch OCEAN’S ELEVEN I end up watching part 2 and 3 also. I think my handsome brain just sees all three of them as one singular six-hour movie. The entire series really is super enjoyable junk food for the brain. Solid acting by the entire cast, a goofy story that’s about as believable as the Book of Genesis, not as many location shots of Las Vegas as I wanted, zero nudity, zero cheerleaders, two bumbling Oceaners who bicker back and forth so much that you wanna bash their skulls together like in HELLRAISER: BLOODLINES, a two-hour runtime that flies by and leaves you wanting more, lots of goofy dialogue that super fun to laugh at, confident direction.

As far as dude-centric, early 2000's American heist films go, OCEAN'S ELEVEN is one of the better ones. It's a good comfort movie to have playing in the background. I wish the people behind the movie would edit together a six-hour supercut of all three films. That way when you're playing it you don't have to flip over to the next film.

Original - Ocean's 11 (1960)
Part 2 - Ocean's Twelve (2004)
Part 3 - Ocean's Thirteen (2007)
Spin-off - Ocean's Eight (2018)

HAIL, CAESAR! (2016)

Around a hour or so into HAIL, CAESAR! I thought to myself "What the hell is this movie?"  IMDb lists it as a "Comedy, Mystery", but there's nothing worth more than a smile throughout the entire thing and I have no idea what the mystery portion could have be.  Yeah, there's a kidnapping but we know who the kidnappers are right from the beginning!

Whatever.  Set in the early 1950's, HAIL, CAESAR! is the story of a Hollywood studio big wig (Josh Brolin) who spends all of his time taking care of production needs and keeping the various studio stars in line.  One day something big comes up when the main actor (George Clooney) in the studio's most expensive film disappears off the set.  Is he on a bender?  Shacked up with a dame?  Or maybe even kidnapped by Communists?  69'ing in the woods with a mountain lion?  Brolin has to get his star back while at the same time taking care of various other problems (pregnant single actress, miscast actor, a tempting job offer, etc), it's all very...blah.

I love classic Hollywood and I was excited to see a modern day film set back in 1950's Hollywood, but HAIL, CAESAR! is a dud.  It looks nice, but the story was all over the place with no true center or even likeable characters.  I kept waiting and waiting for something to develop, then I realized that the movie is already 3/4's done and it's still just flailing around like a boat lost in a storm.

With so much talent (both in front and behind the camera) I was expecting a delightful throwback mystery-comedy, kinda like the wonderful THE CURSE OF THE JADE SCORPION, but that didn't happen.  Instead HAIL, CAESAR! simply putters along and leaves more questions than it answers.  On the bright side I really enjoyed the performances of Alden Ehrenreich and Veronica Osorio.  They were both great. Also, the lighting was nice.

Is that a white SUV off to the right?