‘Ocean’s 8’ isn’t an original score but it still manages to entertain

Posted on June 15, 2018

By MARK VIOLA

If you asked me to rank my favorite movies, something I have never done — and have no plans to do so — I’m quite confident that the 2001 remake of “Ocean’s Eleven,” starring George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon and company, would be safely inside my Top 20 movies of all time. It’s a great heist movie, and it sports one of the best ensembles I can think of in a movie of its type.

Unfortunately, its 2004 sequel, “Ocean’s Twelve,” was a disappointing mess, despite the return of the cast and director Steven Soderbergh. This eventually resulted in the much more satisfying “Ocean’s Thirteen,” which sent the franchise off on a better note, birthing the term “redemption movie” which I have used for films that try to make up for a disappointing installment.

Now, 11 years after the last film in the series, we have a new spin-off, “Ocean’s 8,” with an all-female principal cast centered around Debbie Ocean (Sandra Bullock, “Gravity”), the sister of criminal mastermind Danny Ocean (Clooney). After the massive backlash hurled at “Ghostbusters,” another all-female project, I was curious to see if “Ocean’s 8” would receive a similar treatment. Fortunately, it didn’t happen, and I mostly credit that to the fact that this film is not a remake — throwing out the original stories we’ve all come to love — and instead is a new story set within the existing world of the films that came before it.

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