REVIEW: Ocean’s 8 (2018)

Run Time: 110 Mins
Rated: PG-13
What To Expect: Flat humor, botox

You’d have to wonder how studio execs can’t see it at this point — that feminist rip off movies that are ordered as political statements first, entertainment ventures second, are proving inefficacious at best.  Like Ghostbusters, they’ve made a new all-female comedy ensemble in Ocean’s 8 and it is quite dire.  No laughs are to be found… maybe even worse, you can’t really even laugh at it.

The film has Sandra Bullock star as Debbie Ocean, George Clooney’s (Danny Ocean) estranged sister, she will lead a diamond heist that has been planned for five years from a prison cell.  Just how you plan a diamond heist from the confines of a prison cell is never explained.  The heist takes place with plot twists and turns, or more accurately implausible coincidences.  And Cate Blanchett plays her ‘partner in crime’ with Rhianna plays the technical genius.  Simply expect a rip off with women, that doesn’t even hold up to the hitherto worst entry (Ocean’s 12).

I didn’t laugh once in this film.  ‘Humorous music’ routinely interjected itself to inform you that it was time to laugh, like clapping notifications for the audience of a game show, but curiously nothing humorous was occurring on screen.  While I didn’t laugh, I did scoff at the product placement and Cate Blanchett’s dodgy American accent, the woman has been paid untold millions in this profession for many years, yet still cannot master the easiest accent in the Anglosphere.  Should I also point out that nowhere in recorded history has a troop of female masterminds pulled off a major heist like this?  All men.  Oh, and less than 10% of comedy headliners are female?

The whole thing just seems like a patronizing exercise in trying too hard.

The cast is uninteresting and the story is, even for a comedy, annoying implausible.  One of Bullock’s recruits, Sarah Paulson, leaves her daughter and a million dollar upper-middle class home behind.  Now why would a mother living comfortably, but with a huge responsibility, clear off to assured jail time?  Is it commentary on the ‘home maker’ breaking out and having fun?  Annoying cringe.

To top it off, James Corden appears in this movie.  I hate James Corden.