Extremely Dull

About fifteen minutes into watching this movie, and for the rest of its duration, all I could think about was how badly I would rather just be re-watching Soderbergh's Ocean's 11

The cast was very good (although I thought they should have cast real actresses instead of Rihanna and Awkwafina) and I like the concept of a heist in a high society party, but the results were underwhelming, bland, milquetoast, or whatever other synonym you can come up with for boring and dull

There was no tension. This movie was sorely in need of a gripping villain. The ex-boyfriend character doesn't count, he was just the fall guy. Andy Garcia's character was such a smug douchenozzle that it made you root for Danny Ocean and co. even more. In Ocean's 11 they came across some real roadblocks. Here everything seemed to go down more or less without a hitch. It's a basic tenet of storytelling that the more pain you put your characters through the more rewarding the emotional payoff at the end will be. When I got to the final scene with the group back in their headquarters celebrating, I felt nothing

The main problem was the script and the lazy directing, IMO. Cate Blanchett, Sandra Bullock, and Anne Hathaway are extremely talented and charismatic actresses. Their presence alone made the film watchable, but with stars like that there is no excuse for the forgettable end product that we got