*Mild spoilers for Ocean’s Eight*
Ocean’s Eight is just fine. Like a functional piece of furniture, it accomplishes its modest goals with workmanlike efficiency. A (mostly) talented cast dons glamorous costumes, tangles with buffoonish enemies, and rattles out a decent volley of jokes over a two-hour runtime. As a heist movie, it’s dispiritingly low in actual tension, but a breezy script makes the movie play at a good clip. It’s a pleasant movie, perfectly suited for a lazy summer afternoon viewing.
This is not a review of Ocean’s Eight. Well, it’s not a totalizing review. I won’t be covering the plot details, acting performances, editing, or cinematography in the broad scope of the entire film. I wanted to laser focus all of those elements into a two-minute section of the movie. It’s the most bafflingly sloppy piece of filmmaking I’ve seen all year. In a movie as slickly-made as Ocean’s Eight, it sticks out like a sore thumb. Let’s discuss what I’ve dubbed the PowerPoint Montage. It’ll be a learning experience.
At the end of the film, once our ragtag group of thieves have nabbed a fortune in jewels, they’re standing in a subway train. The camera zooms in on each of their faces, revealing what they did with their share of the money. It’s a standard epilogue for a heist movie. It’s an element I love, since it can provide multiple satisfying denouements instead of the standard one. But this epilogue is all wrong. It’s a mess.
The first close-up focuses on Mindy Kaling. Without warning, the screen spins away like a frisbee. It legitimately looks like an iMovie joke transition effect. We see a shot of Kaling on a date in Paris. The shot dissolves with a series of bars, returning to the train. It centers on another heist member. Once again, the screen flips away like the world’s worst pizza. The bars return and we’re back to the train. These two effects repeat for every thief’s epilogue (excluding Sandra Bullock).
These transitions are beyond hilarious. They’re cheap, amateurish, and wholly embarrassing. They actively demolish the sleek, quasi-stylish tone the film struggles to convey over its runtime. In a mere two minutes, a sloppily produced montage tarnishes a large chunk of the film’s work.
The PowerPoint Montage’s flaws go beyond its transitions. At its core, the montage is soulless and flat. Most of the epilogues lack context or flavour. Rihanna, Cate Blanchett, and Awkwafina receive the faintest of snippets. Rihanna plays pool, Blanchett rides a motorcycle on the coast, and Awkwafina hosts a lifestyle vlog series (I think). These epilogues are so generic and vague they leave no impression on the viewer. These characters never expressed any desire to achieve these goals during the meat of the movie, so their epilogues come out of nowhere. Their character finales are too bland and non-specific to be satisfying.
Other characters have motivations (however slim) for their epilogues, but the lousy production does them in. Kaling Paris date uses worse green screen backgrounds than a Spy Kids movie. Helena Bonham Carter’s fashion show is a grab-bag of haute couture cliches. Sarah Paulson opens a business that seems focused on shipping large boxes.
Anne Hathaway (Oscar winner, somehow) receives a proper epilogue, which shows her as a director talking down to an Anne Hathaway-type actress. It’s a funny slice of character payoff that leans into Hathaway’s public persona and provides a worthy conclusion to her character’s arc. Bullock’s finale is also decent since it’s allowed to break the tedious pattern of the PowerPoint Montage.
In two minutes, one montage soured the taste of an otherwise solid movie. As a whole, Ocean’s Eight is enjoyable, but its doomed montage serves as a warning: Even when you can see the finish line, it’s still possible to lose the race.
