classicsoncall
I liked the opening scene with Jack Foley's (George Clooney) clever bank heist. I wonder if anyone ever tried something like that? But Adele Delisi (Catherine Keener) was right, Jack should have used a car that had a reliable starter. For a smart crook, that was a pretty dumb move.Hard to believe this picture was made twenty years ago as I write this. Clooney and Jennifer Lopez make for an engaging couple, their brief fling in the story set up a momentous final confrontation that provided a not so subtle twist to the outcome. Good support is turned in by Ving Rhames, Don Cheadle and Dennis Farina, with an unnecessary cameo by Michael Keaton that really went nowhere. Although I did like the way Samuel L. Jackson showed up in the closing scene to ride off into the sunset and back to Glades with Jack.Anyone else notice - Clooney's character had the same name as pro wrestler Cactus Jack Foley. He just didn't look as scruffy.
YuunofYork
If Soderbergh has a style, it's bookish pacing and an undercurrent of realism in hyperbolic situations. His choices of scripts are uneven, if not typically on the bland side, but that's okay, because the writing is usually elevated by his choices in above-the-line crew (editing, cinematography, score) and knack for consolidating their work into a single voice. He also usually gets the best performances he can out of his actors, even if it means long hours or re-shoots. Out of Sight typifies this rocky marriage of stylistic integrity and dime store story. Soderbergh has called this film perhaps the most complete of his pictures, and in a structural self-contained way that might be true, but it is far from his best.Jack Foley (Clooney) is a man in his third act. A bank robber committed to his lifestyle, who following his third stint in the penitentiary, has lost any wide-eyed preconceptions he might have had about big scores settling all debts and landing him richly propped up on "some island". He drifts from job to job, annoyed but not surprised things are getting harder, looking not for a swansong, but more of the same. Yet the character is underwritten. He's a well-adjusted prisoner confident around and commanding the respect of tougher types, despite never having used a gun (even for show). He's a "good guy", who doesn't have a problem feeling up a woman at gunpoint, and doesn't worry over the safety of his partners in crime, except for Buddy (Rhames). Personality contradictions like these can be realistic, but they can also be bad writing. Karen Sisco (Lopez) has the same problem, a marshal who pursues men as bounties, lays, or if you're Jack Foley, both. Where does her allegiance lie? To everyone, apparently. Contradiction is the theme here, with former enemies in prison collaborating together on the outside, Buddy, whose commitment to a criminal lifestyle is intact only through a compulsion to confess for hours to his spiritual adviser/sister what he has just done, Sisco's investigator father who disapproves of one of his daughter's unsavory conquests, but not a more dangerous one - and so on. Contradictions may better mirror real life, but even in real life they are often frustrating to us pattern-recognizing humans who prefer to blur away such sharpness to make some sense of the world.The first half is told non-linearly; we see Foley and friends in prison, out, and back in again as we piece together the events that led them to the present, where sadly the story runs straight on until the end. It's a good trick to make an ordinary story more interesting and invests the audience in finding out what is essentially mundane detail, but once it behaves itself it gets far less interesting. There is some plot about uncut diamonds that everyone thinks is true despite telling each other is a lie, but this is secondary to character studies where the characters have no arc and wind up exactly where they were at the beginning.Still, all would be well if these characters, in the end, still felt like real people. Both Foley and Sisco are for the most part written too soft and fluffy for how hard they are supposed to be. This isn't the fault of Lopez or Clooney, although if they did have a choice which way to play it, both certainly went with cotton candy here. Still, this is some of their best acting, as are the performances from Cheedle, Rhames, Guzmán - at the time none of them exactly A-list, but certainly at their peak. One is tempted to say Rhames and Guzmán have become all but typecast in this kind of role, which is a shame, as are Lopez/Clooney's unfortunate excursions into broad, unsubstantial rom/coms.There is a tonal discrepancy marring the picture as well. It is an odd choice that nearly all of the humor is delivered by the most despicable characters, and it comes right before or after they do or were to do rape/murder. It worked in Pulp Fiction, where we see everyone both at their worst and their best, but in Soderbergh's film these are tertiary people who we differentiate in relation to each other rather than their actions and whose names we barely remember scene-to-scene, and whose only redeeming qualities are the two minutes they play the clown before going back to playing the monster. It's just jarring. I'm not sure how much creative control Soderbergh had over the Leonard story, but I wish he had subjected it to rewrites. There is some light entertainment here, but Out of Sight is not so much flawed as rough, like uncut diamonds decorating a fish tank. 6/10
eric262003
"Out of Sight" stars a hard-working bank criminal named Jack Foley (George Clooney) and an temptingly sexy US Marshal Karen Sisco (Jennifer Lopez) are placed in the back of a car truck after Foley makes his escape from a Florida prison. Once his escape the thought has gone as planned, Foley is hunted down by Sisco, while his accomplices which includes his trustworthy assistant Buddy (Ving Rhames) and his not so reliable ally Glenn (Steve Zahn) work their ways to one of the more wealthier suburbs located in nearby Detroit. There they join forces with a suspicious business dealer named Ripley (Albert Brooks) who once sent them to jail on account of uncut diamonds found in his home. A dangerous assassin named Maurice Miller (Don Cheadle) has plans to invade Ripley's mansion accompanied his posse which includes Kenny (Isiah Washington) an White Boy Bob(Keith Loneker). While this is happening, Foley and Sisco get comfortable with each other in a Detroit hotel room where their romance is put to the test concludes in showdown as Foley enters Ripley's estate which contribute to the fun that they were having together. The question is are they in love or is Sisco pursuing to have him arrested? The first thing that caught my eye when watching "Out of Sight" was that it was very cool. But "cool" can be very hard to evaluate. I've been around movies for over 20 years and there have been equally proportioned good "cool" and bad ones as well. In many way, Steven Soderburgh has captured the coolness of this film as a reminiscing of the old 1960's espionage heist film that had run rampant in that time period. The cat games seem to make it very obvious. For a film to succeed in being cool, you need to convey manipulative tactics to your audience to make them think that this movie truly defines "cool" so that they can demand for more. By the time this movie makes it to Detroit is when the cool factor really starts to kick in and that was when I was really starting to like this film.In this movie we can all appreciate the cool things about it, but the more specific definition of the cool factor of this movie is the sexiness it brought to the screen that both genders can truly pander about. I think we all now by now that J-Lo is not that great of an actress. At best she can come across as an average performer (it may not help that her career choices in films have not always been to kind to her). But in "Out of Sight" I'll let the blind squirrel find his nut. In other words, she actually was pretty good here. That's mainly because Mr. Soderburgh knew that at best Miss Lopez can excel if she doesn't do very much on screen. In reality, it's the camera-work that's the real star here and it gives J-Lo the chance to reveal her sumptuous physique without really do much of anything else.On the contrary, George Clooney is a very capable and more competent performer than J-Lo and his camera-work excels better because he can still convey sex appeal to the female audience while at the same time he could back it up with versatile acting. And instead he can takes more charge to the camera than J-Lo and never lets it usurp him. So his combination of suave and talent embodies the dynamics of Clooney's repertoire.Now in most films cool and suave would surely not churn out a film that is real. But much to my surprise, "Out of Sight" actually has a believable story nailed into the suave and sex appeal behind and is never upstaged by it. There are some implausible scenarios that are a bit far-fetched like the climactic heist near the end of the film. But the characters succeed in keeping it real and the situations they face give us that impression as the film progresses. There is great chemistry between J-Lo and Clooney and we feel for them all the way through the film even though they're from the opposing sides of the law (opposites attract). The other supporting cast were also convincing including Ving Rhames as Clooney's trusted accomplice, Steve Zahn as the screw-up assistant and Albert Brooks as the rich nerdy guy. Behind this heist film, we have lots to believe.The camera-work was really put together quite elegantly where the rural and the urban settings really cooperate quite nicely. I thought it was quite believable that Miami looks very vibrant and colorful and while the mean streets of Detroit has the darkness dominating the streets with the exception of the odd bluish tint. And for that the cool factor comes into play with the impression that Mr. Soderbergh chose style over substance in this movie. There are a lot of crime-dramas out there that either choose, style, substance or plausibility. But in "Out of Sight", we see all three come together and to me it really makes my days all the more better.
