Review: Ocean's Eight

There's a lot to love in Ocean's Eight, the all-female spinoff of Steven Soderbergh's Ocean trilogy, even if the film itself is overall not up to par with the level of talent involved. It's slick and stylish, at times flat-out fun, and Anne Hathaway is simply delightful as a magnificently vapid and vainglorious celebrity actress, who has unwittingly been recruited into an elaborate heist masterminded by Debbie Ocean (Sandra Bullock).

Yes, Debbie is Danny Ocean's younger sister, first seen convincing a parole board that all she wants is a simple life. Yet the con runs in her blood for once she is sprung, she not only manages to shoplift some very expensive merchandise from Bergdorf Goodman but also finagles her way into a room at New York's famed Plaza Hotel. It quickly comes to pass that Debbie has not spent the last five years and eight months in prison twiddling her thumbs; she's planned quite a caper and she sets about gathering the crew she needs to pull it off.

First up is best friend and former partner-in-crime Lou, played by Cate Blanchett with insouciant cooler-than-cool swagger. Their spiky banter is consistently amusing, though even Blanchett can't seem to spark Bullock out of her puzzlingly sedate performance. Debbie's plan is to to steal a one-of-a-kind, $150 million Cartier necklace during the Met Gala, one of New York City's most glamorous but heavily secured events. In order to do this, they need a famous starlet - enter Hathaway's Daphne Kluger - to wear the necklace to the gala. Before they can get Daphne to wear the necklace, they need her to hire washed-up designer Rose Weil (Helena Bonham Carter) to dress her for the event so Rose can get access to the necklace and scan it in order for the crew to make a 3D printout that they can later substitute for the real thing. Rounding out the rest of the gang are computer hacker Nine Ball (Rihanna), fence turned suburban mom Tammy (Sarah Paulson), diamond expert and jewellery maker Amita (Mindy Kaling), and nimble-fingered hustler Constance (Akwafina), who provides one of the film's funniest moments by asking Debbie to provide her with a MetroCard so she can take the subway instead of skateboarding into the city every day.

Certainly each actress gets a chance to shine, but Ocean's Eight is really a case of having too much of a good thing and not fully knowing what to do with that abundance of riches. Ocean's Eight doesn't quite groove as a buddy comedy in the same way that the Ocean trilogy did, though that may be more of an issue with the screenplay by director Gary Ross and Olivia Milch than the efforts of the actresses. It's also a niggle that Debbie's reason for the caper is as much motivated by revenge on a former lover as it is for pulling off a job any man, including her brother, could have done. Ocean's Eight also loses a bit of its zippiness as it progresses, only receiving a welcome jolt of energy when James Corden pops up as an insurance fraud investigator later in the film.

Ocean's Eight

Directed by: Gary Ross

Written by: Gary Ross, Olivia Milch

Starring: Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett, Anne Hathaway, Mindy Kaling, Sarah Paulson, Akwafina, Rihanna, Helena Bonham Carter, Richard Armitage, James Corden, Dakota Fanning, Damian Young