I was dissastisfied, on the whole. I felt they were having too much fun with “here’s a goofy cutesy little scene”, as opposed to making a movie where you could really follow what was going on. For instance, Brad Pitt as a seismoligist. Haha! It’s Brad Pitt! But with a beard! And then evil mastermind Al Pacino just accepts this object and leaves it sitting in his office. Oh THAT is some good security.
And the whales couldn’t be in on the scheme, or they would show up on Greco as cheaters, because they were expecting to win, right?
Also, how the hell did Al Pacino cheat Elliot Gould out of half the hotel? He physically threatened him and got him to sign a paper for peanuts? And that would hold up in court?
Oh, and how does a weighted roulette ball guarantee anything at all. Who cares if it’s weighted? That’s not going to make any outcome any more likely than any other outcome…
One the plus side, the hotel was awesomely gorgeous.
Think about the sex.com debacle. Sure the real owner won out at last, but it cost him years and mucho legal fees and he still is unable to collect any real amounts.
Gould was old enough and Pacino had good enough lawyers that Pacino could have held the case up in court long past Gould’s death.
That still seemed awfully implausible. In a movie all about clever machievellian schemes, a master evil genius cehats his partner out of half a mult-billion-dollar hotel by… having a goon threaten him? Come ON.
I just watched the movie this past Friday night in the Lotte Cinema in Seomyeon and I just can’t get this question out of my mind: What is the real hotel they used for the exterior views?
The FBI did not get prints. Nor did the FBI run checks. As has been previously mentioned, and as was established in the film, Bank has an illegal backdoor into FBI databases. He was running his own search. And, we saw in the film, Bank speak to his own security guy to dust the machine that Livingston was working on when it was pulled. Super Dave Caldwell and his team of FBI agents were all cons, but didn’t think to take the machine in as “evidence.” Bank was clever enough to think of grabbing prints and running through his FBI backdoor on his own. Hence the scrambling improvisation of Basher and the Mormons to keep Bank’s eyes off the computer while the images were manipulated*.
*The Oceans crew were able to also hack the FBI database, or at least hack into Bank’s hack, in a matter of minutes, with one of the Mormons who never showed any significant degree of computer skills before that scene? Movie magic, I guess. I’m willing to suspend disbelief.