Kritiken

The film seems so desperate to convince us that women are capable of the same capers as their male counterparts that Ocean’s 8 feels more like reading a manual on the management of a heist than being part of one, wasting precious zinger minutes on tedious explanations of every mouse trap.

It felt like another H-Wood sloppy second–boy director, boy co-writer, boysboysboys behind the camera. Every one of these brilliant female cast members-Rihanna, Cate Blanchett, Mindy Kaling, Awkwafina, Sandy Bullock, Sarah Paulson, Helena Bonham Carter, Anne Hathaway– were reined in by electric dog collars, the plot points and joke setups languished on specially designed fainting couches.

The CT scan has come back, and the results are grim: all members of the octet (save for one inveterate over-emoter) have been flattened and scrubbed of nearly any vivifying trait. . . . If Ocean’s 8 is any guide, to be a female star in 2018, whether long-reigning or ascendant, is to be little more than a cog in the infernal machinery of cross-brand promotion.

It rises and falls on the creation of vivid moments, of characters distilled into gestures and inflections. But the substance and the style of the performers that emerge in alluring flashes is engulfed by a black hole of a dramatic framework, a central emptiness that is a built-in problem of the heist-film genre in the age of digital technology.

Its cast aside, the movie sounds and narratively unwinds like the previous installments, but without the same easy snap or visual allure. As a director, Mr. Soderbergh doesn’t throw the camera around, but one of the pleasures of his movies is a commitment to beauty as a cinematic end. Here, the actresses carry that burden.

It could learn a thing or two about brevity and craft: It belabors the basic plot points Ocean’s 11 dispatched with a single cut or smirk, the result a hacky imitation of the series’ glitzy pizzazz.