Monday, September 12, 2005

What's wrong with Ocean's 11

So last night Ocean's 11 was on TV, so I watched it. Not to say I haven't seen this movie a dozen times already, so it gave me a lot of time to overanalyze how the plot at the end of the movie makes absolutely no logical sense whatsoever. Now I realize that creative license must be taken in order to make a movie work, and that is fine--I still think it's an excellent movie--but there are some things at the end that make zero practical sense (plausible, yes, but ridiculous) that just leave me wishing the script writers could have tried a little harder. Case in points:

1) The "pinch" they use to knock out power to the entire city of Las Vegas... but only for 30 seconds. I'm not an electrical engineer, so I won't comment on the feasibility of the concept. I bought it as face value that some device could emit an EM pulse that knocked out all electricity in the entire city of Las Vegas in the blink of an eye. What I don't buy is that it all would miraculously repair itself in a matter of 30 seconds and come back on without any perpetual damage whatsoever. Not a chance.

2) Even through the end of the movie, Benedict doesn't notice that his "double-secret vault codes" that he put in his jacket pocket are missing. He's gone to the fight, found out somebody's broken into his vault, but STILL doesn't connect the dots with his missing codes. Surely he would have needed to use the codes just to get back into his super-secure vault complex, yet he just walks right in after he knows it's been broken into. No, don't buy it.

3) The key element of the vault that lets Benedict know he's been had: the Bellagio logo on the floor of the vault entrance. This is the most ridiculous scenario I could ever imagine. First, this vault was built several years ago, (which by the way is connected to the cages at the Bellagio, Mirage, and MGM grand, which is about a mile down away from the other two, but I can overlook that), and now he has this logo put on the floor of the vault where he "had it installed last week". WHAT?!! Did he trust a bunch of construction workers to just come down and tear up the floor to put in a new logo while there was $100 million sitting next to them in the vault? Did he just happen to have decided that the solid black marble floor was not gaudy enough and he needed to put the Bellagio logo on the floor of the vault (that, as we recall, serves not only the Bellagio, but Mirage and MGM as well)? And furthermore, last week he installed it, but none of the 11 who have been watching his own vault using his own security cameras noticed that he installed this logo on the floor, which blew a hole in their plan to stage a fake heist of his vault? No. I buy this the least of all. Ridiculous.

But like I said, it's still a good movie. :)

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