My family loves to watch movies. When we discover that a movie is a remake of an original we’ll track down the original and compare the two. As a genre, we like heist movies because they add an intellectual level to the story that elevates it above common thievery. There’s also the romantic notion of a group of well-funded specialists doing the impossible. Ocean’s Eleven is one such movie.

The 1960 version of Ocean’s Eleven starred a group of entertainers known as the Rat Pack. The Rat Pack, led by Frank Sinatra, were the darlings of Las Vegas and epitomized the good life of the era. Despite the box-office draw of the Rat Pack, Ocean’s Eleven was dismal. Poor dialog, a strange love affair between Frank Sinatra and Angie Dickinson that went nowhere, and the way the whole plan just fizzled into failure. Most heist movies were upscale affairs with precise timing, unbelievable gadgets, and a sense of flair that the average movie-goer could only dream of ever having. The 1960 Ocean’s Eleven had none of these.

The 2001 version of Ocean’s Eleven had all of these and a wonderfully eclectic group of characters that almost super-ceded the story itself. However, I have to wonder about the moral implications of the 2001 version in which the thieves win. Is this a harbinger of moral degradation in which the bad guy wins? The same moral switch was made between the two version of the Italian Job. The original had the bad guys losing, the latest version had the thieves winning.

It could be argued that a movie is just entertainment and for the short time of an hour or two we can temporarily suspend morality. Or maybe we can rationalize the situation by saying that Terry Benedict was a truly bad man and deserved what he got and the owners of the “gold bars with the Balinese dancer” were mafia so it wasn’t really stealing if you stole it from the mafia. Such is the ambiguous nature of film morality, you can always setup the situation and the script to justify just about anything.

No one in my family liked the original Ocean’s Eleven despite Frank Sinatra. It was just too flat and depressing. No cool gadgets. No split-second timing. The new version, superbly played by Clooney, Pitt, and excellent supporting characters had some real pizzaz, not only in the story but in the interaction between the characters themselves. So, well done was the 2001 version that the follow-on movies Ocean’s Twelve, and Ocean’s Thirteen were welcomed additions to the franchise.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 5th, 2008 at 8:20 pm and is filed under Movie-going. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.