The A to Z of things that annoy me in videogames

I felt like doing a (click-bait) top-‘something’ list. Just some of those things that bug me in computer games. So without further ado...drumroll please.

AI needs saving

Best example: Resident evil 4.

Saving character A no matter what. It happened in Resident Evil 4, The last of us and, most famously, in Metal Gear Solid: Sons of liberty you got her killed for your effort.

Nothing wrong with saving a character as long as (often) 'her' AI is up to scratch. Unfortunately usually the –to be saved- character walks around like a gigantic alarm clock calling all monsters to dinner.

Backgrounds keep resetting

Best example: Wolfenstein (2009).

There is nothing more annoying than walking through a house and destroying everything in sight, then leaving, only to find minutes later that the entire room is in top notch condition again.

If all rooms already look similar it really makes you second-guess if you’ve been there before.

The same goes for self closing doors. How can you explore a house when every door you open, to mark a room searched, automatically closes itself again? Let alone if a door closes on you mid combat.

Conjuring up more enemies

Best example: State of Decay, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, any 2-D scroller.

The Norway level in Return to castle Wolfenstein. You killed each and every Nazi on your path but somehow, as you backtrack to collect some ammo, you find a new bunch of Nazis blocking your path. Where did those bastards come from? The level doesn’t have any locked doors or anything so what...did they spawn from a tree or something?

In State of Decay it is even worse. You just cleaned the area of zombies, there isn’t one for over at least a mile. You turn your back for one second and suddenly a whole group of them spawn right behind you.

I want my enemies to be countable. It’s not a Hollywood movie in which the hero finds himself against an army of henchmen simply because the main villain decided to open up another acme canister labelled ‘instant henchmen’.

Digital protection

Best example: Batman Arkham Asylum.

There’s nothing wrong with a company trying to keep a game from being stolen. However, if the failsafe mechanism you put on the game actually prevents players from either playing or (later) re-playing it you have a problem.

This happened with my legal copy of Batman Arkham Asylum. With the big digital copyright safe door it is now impossible to play.

Everlasting cut scenes.

Best example: Ducktales: remastered, any Metal Gear Solid-game

Computer games only recently managed to take stories to a new level. ‘You are the torturer!’ (Grand theft auto). 'Your choices dictate the end’ (the Telltale games). ‘You are this person and this is your story and these are your faults –take it or leave it’ (The last of us).

Before this computer games never really managed to outgrow the B-movie narrative (Alundra: everybody dies). Games tried to put the ‘fate of the world’ on your shoulders. But in the end it all comes down to ‘goodie’ killing ‘baddie’.

The problem, however, is that computer games don’t always recognize that they are telling a 'not very good' story. And, in that sense, there’s nothing more frustrating than an unskippable cutscene wherein some character is going on and on.

A sub-category would be the unskipable cut-scene mid game. So Scrooge McDuck pausing his adventuring to give a lengthy monologue about a coin he just found in the Amazones in Ducktales remastered. It takes the flow out of the game.

Following the law?

Best example: Driver.

You are driving along following all the traffic rules. You stop at a stop sign and the AI car behind you accidentally nudges your rear.

Suddenly the cops are all over you with deadly intent. No matter how good you are, one misstep and suddenly you're the worst of criminals.

Grinding.

Best example: Any Final Fantasy game.

Grinding is like digital training. Doing the same kind of fights over and over again in games for the experience point to make you character stronger (for the next episode of the game).

Grinding isn’t a bad thing per se. You can use it to develop you characters a bit this way or a bit that. But in ‘ye olden days’ there wasn’t a lot of variety of character development. In Final Fantasy 6 you, pretty much, taught every spell to every playable character.

Grinding is annoying if it limits the enjoyment of the game. Skyrim stopped being fun for me because I finished every single quest at level 60. Which meant I still had over ten levels to go before the dark knight would pop up.

Final Fantasy 6 to 10 would usually bring you to the end fight with characters severely outclassed at level 50.

A good game levels you along the way. You can, pretty much, finish it without any additional grinding. A bad (or even terrible game) let’s you grind for three days straight. A worse game, however, leaves you with a barrel full of ruby encased golden rings just because you wanted to up your smiting skill – I’m looking at you skyrim.

Helping characters.

Best example: Rainboy six.

Again like ‘AI needs saving’, helpers have a tendency to stand in the way. Sometimes I think I shot more of my brethrens in Rainbow six than actual villains because those fools decided to disco-dance in front of me.

Other examples would include: you are trying to sneak somewhere but the helper keeps attacking everything in sight. You are trying to hide but your helper pushes you forwards so the enemy spots you. You are trying to flee but lo and behold your helper is standing in the way. You just evaded standing on the trap button, your helper however...

Even more annoying are helpers who, by trying to advance the mission, keep repeating the same line over and over again while you are exploring the area: “Go through the door…Go through the door…Go through the door…”

I know!

Impossible controls.

Best example: Metal Gear Solid and Tomb Raider.

Making Lara Croft jump accordingly while balancing on a cliff. Having Solid Snake actually escape a perilous situation instead of crouching. Or, with PC-ports finding the right button on your keyboard.

More often than not I died because I couldn’t quite remember which button to push on my keyboard.

Jumping is a no-no

Best example: The Silent Hill-games.

You can walk, run, swim, limp, climb on a ledge, handle a chainsaw but you cannot jump.

There are still some games that give you all kinds of handy traits yet our hero cannot jump. It’s one of those ‘barriers’ that don’t work anymore in this day and age.

Also, characters dying when they fall in water...really?

Killing yourself is a no-no

Best example: The Silent Hill-games.

When I played Alex Kidd in Miracle World I would (sometimes) lose a life in the very first level. Instead of continuing I would kill ‘Alex’. After all it’s easier to die and play again than to go on or reset the system and wait for the game to load. So there I was saying: “Here birdy...”

But sometimes you can’t kill yourself. You can’t throw yourself in a chasm in Silent Hill and in other games the hero keeps on taking health packs until he runs out. Actually getting a 'game over' screen in some games is qute the challenge.

Levelling helpers.

Best example: Any MMORPG.

You enter an online roleplaying game fresh: ready to explore. And the minute you spawn there is already a cult hanging around you wanting you to be part of their guild, tribe, whatever.

Those ‘level fifty’ or so are often seen walking together with a low level player defeating high-level monsters to give the ‘new kid’ some experience points.

What’s the point of playing if some guy helps you level faster?

Moving levels.

Best example: Super Mario brothers.

These 2D-levels are usually combined with a death fall. Mario is the worst. A screen that moves and the minute you are too slow and get off-screen you die. So you have to plan your jumps correctly...a bleeding nightmare.

None-existent plumbing or: no logic in map building.

Best example: Chrono Trigger.

If you’ve been playing computer games for as long as I have you’ve seen a lot of development in het housing department. Around the 1990’s games houses suddenly gained pluming and toilets.

True, sometimes a household of two only had one bedroom (Chrono Trigger and his mom) – but it was a start.

However, the inability of logical reasoning of housing still persists to this day where computer games forget the necessities every once in a while.

But what is more annoying are those moments you are exploring an open 3D world and walking towards an open field only find out some invisible wall is stopping you (especially if you can see your target).  Why not put a wall there or something? At least something visual to keep the game map logical.

Also games that put a flimsy crooked fence in front of you that you cannot pass or a door you can’t blast open with a grenade launcher should be condemned.

Overpowering the player early on.

Best example: Bioshock.

Some games give a player an edge early on in a game. Wolfenstein (2009) had the time-stopping technique. Bioshock 1 and 2 the bees. The minute you’ve got those weapons/skills in your arsenal the rest of the game is a breeze.

It’s difficult to balance a game between easy and (Battletoads) sheer impossible. But when a game fails in this department it fails hard because people want to be challenged.

Ports and glitches.

Best example: Silent hill homecoming

Around 2005 a new trend in games started to pop up: unfinished games.

Apparently it is cost effective to just sell a game even though it isn’t finished. Another method is by simply transferring a games from a consol to a PC or vice versa without actually checking for bugs.

Quicksaves.

Best example: Fallout 3 and on and Skyrim.

Games try to balance between accessible and difficult. One way of making it easier on the player is by means of the so-called Quicksave. Every step of the way the game saves for you. However, saving every step I make in a game doesn’t automatically make it any better. I want to return every once in a while. I don’t want the game to hold my hand.

I learned this the hard way when I killed all the Ghouls in Fallout 3’s Tenpenny Tower quest. Suddenly the radiohost Three-Dog called me a scumbag every time I turned on the radio. And there was no way of me returning to a previous Quicksave to fix the error because it had already been overwritten.

Though, this questline is a bit problematic. If you help the Ghouls everybody in the tower dies. So it’s not really a win-win.

Revenue

Best example: any EA or Star Wars game.

This is the silly one. Having to buy extra stuff for your game that makes you wonder why the developers didn’t include it in your game in the first place.

Back in the day one could buy a game manual for Final Fantasy 9 on the Playstation. This manual had every trick and secret of the game. Except it wouldn’t tell you. You had to write down a codeword, fire up your computer and fill in the word one some website to unlock the secret.

Then there’s Alex Kidd in High Tech World -an unabashed commercial for Sega.
Imagine that you are in a town with some shops, a temple and, at the end, a guard post where the guard tells you he requires a passport for you to proceed. Now the tool-shop sells a printing press. The bookshop sells a handy book about printing false passports. Do you print the passport? Of course not; you pray at the temple a hundred times for some spirit (you didn’t know existed) to appear and give you a passport.

I’m convinced that this trick was conceived to get kids, like me, to call the SEGA tips and cheats hotline (0,50 per call).

Sufficient to say this kind of reasoning never really went away, but it is still silly.

Sierra-logic

Best example: King’s Quest V.

The game gives you certain items and you just have to used them by trial and error to see which one works. There are no clues given, you just simply click the pie instead of the sword on the yeti and lo-and-behold it works. Don't think, just experiment. It degrades the player to just lucky instead of an intelligent problem solver.

If you know what Ifnkovhgroghprm means you are as ancient as I am.

This technique or guessing was first implemented in Sierra’s King’s Quest V –hence the title- but it still continues to this day in Hidden object games.

You want to cut open a parcel tied by rope. Do you use: A) a knife? B) a saw? C) a pair of scissors? or D) you go all over the place looking for a letter opener? If you answered ‘D’ you know hidden object games.

Tried and tested old-school puzzles.

Best example: Fear for sale: tiny terrors and many other HOGs.

There are some puzzles that have been around since the Victorian age. Like peg-solitaire, sliding puzzles or The Tower of Hanoi. Hidden object games love to include these games in their repertoire. So if you play a lot of hidden object games you will find that you will be replaying peg-solitaire over and over again because the designers were too lazy to come up with something original.

Underwater levels.

Best example: Sonic the hedgehog.

Not only can you not move the way you want to (usually slower). You are also bound to a silly breath-meter that tells you when you are going to drown. I hate those levels. I can’t count the ways I almost had my little Sonic near the exit only to wait for an air-bubble that never came.

Viewfinder

Best example: any first-person shooter.

Those unlimited ammo guns that a locked at a single place (“press F to use”). I never use them but sometimes I have to. So you have this gun and you are firing at everyone and everything while you cannot move and every enemy is throwing everything at you.

Walking back and forth.

Best example: The castaways: the island, Wolfenstein (2009).

Walking back and forth all the bloody time between mission givers and mission. Bad games often place the mission giver and the actual goal a million miles apart. There is some deluded reasoning behind it that all that trekking actually makes for enjoyable game time – it doesn’t.

In Wolfenstein (2009) the game-designers tried something new. A city under Nazi siege would be your (RPG-like) homebase where you would receive missions to carry out.

However, the person giving the mission and the actual ‘door’ to the mission were often at the other side of town. So you spent a large chunk of the game running from one side of the city to the next like a glorified errand boy before you could actually play a mission.

X is the end (not).

Best example: My Hero and Jade Cocoon.

"A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” Confucius says. But a journey is nothing without an end –I would like to add.

So, there’s nothing more frustrating than a game that doesn’t end. I’ll forgive the early games like My Hero (beating up the bad guy for the seventeenth time – the guy never learns). But it sticks. It went all the way to the PSX with Jade Cocoon.

Now with games like Fallout and Skyrim there will never truly be an end to any game (unless the quests run out). And with massive landscapes to walk upon and constant respawning enemies (I must have killed most of Pennsylvania by now) the game stays divers.

However, wandering the wasteland gets boring after a while. Everything needs to end sometimes (just not like New Vegas ended – freaking Romans? Really?)

Yes Dave, I can’t do that Dave.

Best example: Tetris.

Like 2001’s HAL couldn’t truly grasp the sense of human reasoning computers can’t grasp the notion that sometimes a random generated move might leave the player without a chance.

So whoever player Tetris will recognize the feeling of waiting for a ‘long piece’ that never comes (or too late). The computer merely randomizes, but the player (sometimes) suffers.

Zooid

Best example: The lion king and any early PC game.

The ‘I just can’t wait to be king’-level in the Lion King is a gamer nightmare. The rich animation of the game makes it very hard to pinpoint the ‘mask’ that would make little Simba hang on to the hippo’s tail. And that’s only the start. After that there’s an ostrich ride that is sheer impossible with a ‘double jump’ nightmare.

In short I’m talking about the mask around a game sprite. An invisible layer -where the code is at- which you are actually playing. The animation layer is just there so you can see your avatar.

The mask is usually a little bit bigger than the animation. If the mask is hit the animation layer plays the ‘ouch’ animation. But if the animation is too complex -consisting of multiple divers frames of different sizes- it becomes quite challenging to make an avatar move through a dangerous field without dying. Your eyes see a small frame but the mask is actually big – dodging bullets or (bird nests) are then quite impossible.

So there you have it! My (personal) list of twenty-six annoyances in videogames. Enjoy.

Strange movie names quiz 1.

Movies come and go and so do the names of characters. However, sometimes a name sticks: Rollo Tomassi, Keyser Soze and Henry –Indiana- Jones Jr.  We’ve heard those names before and we know where they are from.

So why not make a small quiz out of it? A few names all bound together in a given theme and it’s up to you to guess the corresponding movie. See how many you get.

Theme: (Fictional) Demons 
Naming something gives you power over it. That’s been the case since the moment of your birth. In demonology it has an even bigger importance. Knowing the name of a demon allows you to cast the creature back to the flaming pit of hell it crawled from.

Horror movies are very happy with this concept. Quite often, discovering the name of the demon is an important plot point. So of the names given below, in which movie did they torment our heroes? 

1. Abalam

The last exorcism.

2. Abizo the Dybbuk

The posession.

3. Azazel

Fallen.

4. Baal

The rite.

5. Bughuul/Baghul

Sinister.

6. Calcifer

Howl's Moving Castle.

7. Mephistopheles

Faust.

8. Paimon

Hereditary.

9. Pazuzu

The Exorcist.

10. Sammael

Hellboy.

11. The lipstick faced demon

Insidious.

12. Valak

The conjuring 2.

13. Zuul

Ghostbusters.

Rediscovering a song (badly).

We all have them. Those old songs that –memory tells you-, at the time, you liked yet you, for the life of you, can’t remember the artist or the title of the song; often you can´t even remember the words.

Here I just want to write down five cases of re-finding a song ranging from ‘easy’ to ‘near impossible’. Maybe it will help some people who are looking for that one song they heard somewhere on springbreak during the 90’s with lyrics that went: “la la la” (2 Eivissa by the way).

Easy peasy.

If you are in a bar or a club often a song comes by that you might not know (yet). There’s a handy app for that called Shazam.

Shazam was a pretty strange event in my social life (even stranger than suddenly having 50+ people on my jogging route looking for Pokemon). There you are, in some bar, slamming down some beers, mustering up the courage to talk to some girl. When, all around you people are holding their phones up to the music speaker.  Shazam really broke down the icebreaker of: “Can you help me? Do you know the title of this song?”

Basically a song is on and instead of waiting for (daddy) deejay to name the artist and title (or ask that one girl) you let Shazam listen to it. Easy as pie, but not good for your social life.

Some hope left.

Sometimes you remember a word or two from the lyrics. That’s perfect because now you can do a google-search. Just enter something like: ´Lyrics "take me” “home” “I´m gone”. I´m sure the first topic that will show up will bring you an Aha-erlebnis.

Common sense, here, is key! I doubt that I listen to a lot of religious music so a lot of those results I can skip. The same goes for rap-music.

Unfortunately the poetic musings of rap music have taken hold in this world. This, because rap-music has a tendency to use ‘all the words around’ making it more likely that the first three search-results are some hip-hopper trying to make a buck. Thus cluttering up the results.

Still, if you use common sense it’ll take you no more than ten minutes to find what you’ve been looking for.

But then…what if you don’t know any of the lyrics?

A little hope left.

Images are powerful things. Images combined with words, however, are a recipe for disaster.

A good example would be ‘Last stop this town’ by the Eels.

I remembered the video: It featured some guy getting cloned in a carrot. In the end the carrot was placed in a wind-up robot and walked away.

Googling: ‘Guy cloned in carrot’. And entering the image tab the first hit is a screenshot of the music video. All the other hits were rappers making a buck.

But it’s not always that easy.

'Daydream in blue’ by I Monster, for instance, is a prime example.

I remembered the video: It featured some gothic-dressed people singing and some dolls. I also remembered a Barbie doll in a dominatrix outfit.

Now, Googling ‘Barbie in leather’ will bring you all kinds of websites you don’t want to see. Trust my word on this…so the context of the video made it harder for me to find the actual song.

Dropping the Barbie-angle made it a whole lot easier for me to re-find the song.

No hope left.

So, Google isn’t always your friend. You can’t blame the search engine but it will always offer the most popular result first. So any recent song/image/video that slightly matches your description will pop up first.

Blame the next generation for this and humanity’s inability to look back at the past.

Now try this description:

A woman, some sort of queen with a crown and everything, is reading a pamphlet to a bum. She chases him and dives (after him) into the canal. Later they dine together in a palace being husband and wife. Oh and the video was in black-and-white.

Naturally, Google will jump at the chance to bring Freddy Mercury centre stage the minute I enter the search-word ‘Queen’.
I mean, I like the man, but he’s not the one I’m looking for.

Second, because this is an old video I have to sort through numerous contemporary videos and pictures that feature some sort of queen and crown.

The black-and-white angle doesn’t work either. The Google-image function that lets you set the search results to black-and-white automatically assumes that you are looking for Madonna going Vogue. Whilst Wikipedia’s list of black-and-white videos only mentions the ‘really important’ videos shot in black-and-white (e.g. Wonder wall or Firestarter).

So this one is, to say the least, a bit of a problem. The music video you are looking for has to be unique enough to make a dent. After all compared to a guy getting ‘cloned into a carrot’ a singing queen is rather mundane.

Not a chance.

To end with sheer insanity. Back in the day I had a disc full of Midi-files. You could buy those things back then, just CD-roms filled with random stuff.

These CD-roms were like treasure-troves, you never knew what you were going to get.

I actually found a marvellous MOD song about peanut butter from one of them; which is as silly as it sounds.

On one of those discs there was a Midi-file named 3535SPEW.mid. No artist no nothing, just some synthesizer song that sounded familiar to me.

How to find a song if don’t know the artist, title, or even if it is man or woman singing (or if the song contains singing at all)?

What I did was to write down the sheet music of the song. There are numerous programs that can convert a Midi-file to sheet music. But –because I wasn’t really thinking ahead- then I still had a problem because there was no search engine to compare it to.

Nowadays, however, we have Musipedia. And lo and behold: it works. You just fire up the flash-piano and get creative.

But, about five years too late for me since I already found it due to sheer luck. One evening I was nostalgically clicking old music videos on Youtube and suddenly I rediscovered it.

The song was Roxette’s ‘Spending my time’ (=SPE) by the way.

From easy to difficult: pop culture can get in the way

So there you have it. What I tried to highlight here is how difficult it becomes to find a song based on the images of the music video if it isn’t popular and/or new.

Luckily MTV’s time of music videos has come to an end –though it does sometimes happen that the channel plays a song or two between teen pregnancy’s- and with the online world now at our fingertips it is far easier to find something you listened to a few weeks ago. A few years, however; not a chance.

What to do with Mission Impossible after Tom Cruise?

If Tom Cruise finally decides to stop playing Ethan Hunt in the Mission Impossible movies? What then? I think the franchise after Hunt could change a few things for the better. Here are some suggestions/critiques.

Less drama

The Tom Cruise Mission Impossible movies are awesome with Tom Cruise in them. They aren't, however, very good at drama. One can easily skip each and every moment of sorrow with Hunt's wife or the various heartaches peppered throughout the tale. They don't work. There's a madman on the loose intent on destroying the world - does Hunt really need an emotional reason as well?

Less hero-worship

The second big problem with the Mission Impossible movies is the hero-worship of the Ethan Hunt-character. Mission Impossible is the 21-century version of Sherlock Holmes: One hero and everybody around him being in awe.

And Watson 'ejaculating' as the joke goes.

Now, to be honest, Tom Cruise gets away with it.

But should he ever retire the character I think the Mission Impossible franchise should alter its direction a bit.

I always enjoyed Mission Impossible as the American counterbalance to the utterly British James Bond movies. The conspiracies, the constantly changing superiors, the military force and of course, (especially in the TV-show) the fact that the 'crime of the week' was solved by the team. Not just one person but an entire team.

So, should Tom Cruise ever retire. The team should take centre stage more. Each and every member doing an insane action stunt every once in a while.

Emphasize the elements

James Bond has the 'barrel walk' - Mission Impossible has the 'lit fuse'.

James Bond has M - Mission Impossible has the tape that will self-destruct.

Keep these elements! This is something Mission Impossible: fallout did right. But these elements should return each and every movie to stick it all together as a series.

The Mission Impossible movies have been a bit lacking in doing this. With the series taking three distinct cinematic styles in the first three movies and still (we're at part six now) not really finding its footing. So, perhaps, should Cruise hang up his 'Hunt Cape' an opening format could be developed that is the same for every movie.

Per example: The German crime-show Tatort still has the same opening from the seventies.

What to do with Tom Cruise himself?

In the first Mission Impossible it was the hero of the TV-show that turned out the be the villain. I argue that it would be nice for Cruise to go down the same route in his last outing.

But, I am actually rather certain that he won't/couldn’t do that. So, instead, Tom Cruise should take on the M part of the Mission Impossible universe. The director, the voice on the tape. Not just for one movie but for all eternity.

Anyway, these were some thoughts on the Mission Impossible movies. Just format it a bit more, let the team work more and cut down on the unnecessary drama. The stunts they can keep. Though I seriously doubt anybody other than The Cruise would be crazy enough to do them.

I always enjoyed the quote: This is not mission difficult, Mr. Hunt, it's mission impossible. Difficult should be a walk in the park for you. These kinds of cheesy one-liners should be used more often.

Dictionary entry: Covfefe

I don’t often allow myself to get too political on this corner of the internet. But I just couldn’t help myself having some fun with this harmless joke. It’s been over a year now since the sitting president tweeted covfefe and he still hasn’t gotten ‘round to admitting it was a typo.

Instead he's going on about some silly deep state-thing that those who should know, know.

So why not include it in the dictionary. At least, here is my suggestion.

Ocean’s Eight – a review

Debbie Ocean, the sister of Danny Ocean, is released from prison. Once out she gets a team together to steal a priceless necklace during the most exclusive gala New York city has to offer. Will she and her fellow criminals get away with it? Of course they will.

First things first

The famous heist movie genre can roughly be categorized in two distinct groups:  (1.) One, A group of people doing a heist, not a lot of celebrities involved. The outcome could go either way. And (2.) two, the big celebrity extravaganza in which the crime usually succeeds.

I think, by my tone, you’ll surmise that I prefer the first. As such, I think you’ll understand that I’ve never been much of a fan of the Ocean’s Eleven remakes.

Still, Ocean’s Eight has a lot to offer the audience so why not enjoy it.

Political Correctness only applies to females apparently

I don’t like writing these words. But apparently they have to be written.

Ocean’s Eight is a pretty good female movie.

The reason I don’t like writing this is because a movie shouldn’t be judged by how many women are in the lead.

Second, nowadays, being a female-lead movie also automatically demands the movie to be divers. So the cast isn’t all white. Nope every age, colour and creed is in this movie.

Apparently if you want to prove (as moviemakers) that women can just as easily star in a blockbuster movie as men you have to pick up the various other inequality-gloves as well.

That makes it harder.

In this sense it is very easy to fail. Because apart from making a good movie you (as a moviemaker) also have to jump through several political correct loops to satisfy the demand.

So Ocean’s Eight has an African-American, an Indian-American and a Asian-American in the main cast. But, luckily, these actresses do get to do a little bit more than merely flesh out the demographic.

Plus they are a whole lot more fun than the white leads.

That’s why Ocean’s Eight is a good movie. It learned from its predecessors (and where those movies failed) and leapfrogged over the ‘Political Correct Pitfalls’.

For instance, it being an Ocean-sequel there has to be a reference or two to the original trilogy (or maybe even the Rat-pack one). There are references in this movie but only politely. Never so demanding as in the Ghostbusters remake.

Second, yes there is an all woman-cast but that ‘Elephant in the room’ is only mentioned once and then quickly discarded with a simple line of dialogue.

When you think about it: why weren’t there more women in the Ocean’s movies.

So, in short, one could call Ocean’s Eight a triumph because it one of the first movies in our current gender/minorities-struggling climate to actually manage not to get too flustered by all the do’s and don’t western culture is demanding from it.

Having that said...

I opened this paragraph with the words: Ocean’s Eight is a pretty good movie. It is a very good movie in evading all those above-mentioned pitfalls. However, as a movie on its own there are a few lesser beats that prevent it from being ‘very good’. Basically it boils down to mistakes, missed opportunities and a strange final act.

Now, the mistakes are forgivable. True there are some scriptural errors (how did a con-artist get an invitation to an exclusive gala again? Why are there no cameras on particular spots?), or some basic editing flaws (the 180 line/rule being crossed).  Then there’s the moment when a character categorically says she won't do something and then still does it. Which would be fine if the movie showed the fallout – which it doesn’t.

But then, these mistakes don’t hurt the movie that much. Besides: watching our dangerous dames walking down the stairs in their bling at the end of the movie charm you enough to forgo those little japes.

Missed opportunities

What the movie could've worked with more (and does try in fact) is the sexist driven feminine culture. The heist takes place at an all gossipy gala where nobody cares who you truly are but 'who' you are wearing. A wonderful sneer at the fashion industry - or, at least, that's how I read it.

There are little stabs here and there that would've been a bit more daring should they've been explored more.

Then there’s the lack of tension. The movie -as all the Ocean's movie do- is a bit lacking in tension. The fun part of any heist movie is the danger that our heroes might get caught (even though you know that that's not going to  happen). However, in every Ocean’s movie you are rooting for the glamorous celebrities so hard that it would be very unlikely that they’d fail (which is why the classic is such a great film).

In Ocean's Eight this danger is even more lacking. From the start you know they'll get away with it and there isn't a single hurdle in the way.

The cast

The cast, overall, is perfectly fine. I could’ve done with some extra fleshing-out of characters. Cate Blanchett, for instance, remains a bit two-dimensional to me. And Sandra Bullock (who actually speaks rather understandable German) is a bit hovering  over it all without a lot of emotional depth. But, in the end, it’s not necessary to bring the story to a successful close.

Hathaway, then, is wonderful as a -not very nice- woman. She’s always cast as a 'goody two shoes’ (even in Colossal) so isn’t it great that she’s a villain for once?

Alas that’s not truly the case in this movie. In fact, Ocean’s Eight lacks a true, bad to the core, villain.

SPOILER: The movie is called Ocean's Eight after all. And yes, thirty minutes in I did do a headcount.

Anyway, I’m voting Anne for Bond-villain sometime in the future.

To tackle another underwritten character I would name Sarah Paulson. Her character is wonderfully conceived as the soccer-mom with a criminal double life. Yet, the movie doesn’t do anything with her character to juxtapose it a bit more. Just a fun scene of her doing something ‘traditionally female’ (like changing a nappy) while conning somebody over the phone would be enough to enrich the character even more.

Mindy Kaling, then, is charming and her introduction-scene is enough to elevate the character. It’s fast, (it reminded me of the fast introduction of characters in The Cabin in the Woods) solid and you know what kind of woman you are dealing with.

She doesn’t get a lot to do after that but her character, due to this one scene, remains the most fleshed out one.

The same goes for Helena Bonham Carter’s character who plays goofy as she is known to. She does need a bit more scenes to find her footing but, even though the movie pretty much forgets her two-thirds in, once she does she lingers as a key factor in the crime posse.

To end with the (‘I’m drowning in her eyes’) Rihanna. She is charming as nine-ball and actually makes you forget that she’s a big-star singer. In fact, she’s actually rather believable as a computer hacker.

What is it with teen-idols playing computer hackers? Selena Gomez, now Rihanna. Who’s next?

But then, it is with the inclusion of her sister that the problems of the movie start. It’s an additional five minutes the flow of the movie doesn’t need. And it gets worse after the heist.

The final act

The final act feels forced and, as a results, bloats the movie when it really shouldn’t. The question: ‘did they get away with it?’ only ever works as (almost) an afterthought. It shouldn’t last more than five minutes.

In Topkapi the criminals got arrested. In Grand Slam the money got stolen. And in the Italian Job there was Michael Caine trying to stay positive. All taking place in approximately five minutes to send the entirety of the movie previous (happily) topsy-turvy.

In Ocean’s 11 it was interwoven into the heist itself- that’s another way to do it.

But as previous, bad, examples show – Now you see me too comes to mind- overdoing it diminishes the effect of the movie and, worse, sometimes even makes the main characters gloating.

So the final act of Ocean’s Eight suddenly spring the insurance investigator (played by Jeremy Corbin) on the viewer and delves into an entirely new story. A story that, to me, could’ve been interwoven in the fabric of the movie previous a lot better.

I often explain the acts of a movie as follows:
It’s Christmas and you are sitting by the tree ready to unwrap your present (act 1),
you try to unwrap the present (act 2),
you admire your gift (act 3)
and –only sometimes- there’s a fourth act that can be anything:
The present is a note that says look in the barn. It’s a music box given by your late grandma. Or it’s just a box with something else in it.

The point being that the fourth act is nothing without the previous three. So it should have a direct link.

Concluding

Now, the Ocean’s movies always get a lot of slack from me because the main characters pretty much get away with everything while sparkling their dazzling white teeth. Gloating in the end is to be expected. And, in this sense, Oceans Eight isn’t going to break the mould.

Still, I would definitely argue that of the three (four) previous movies Ocean’s Eight earns a solid second place after the remake (tied with the classic just because of that brilliant ending).

Each actress is solidly in place as they cheat and charm their way to win the prize of prizes.

Hopefully they will return. Because now that there’s a movie out that proves that a women-powered movie (with all the additional baggage such a movie has to drag along) can work. There’s no point stopping just yet.

Why not steal the crown jewels of England? Those haven’t been cinematically nicked for quite a while now.

Apart from that Sherlock Episode I think we have to go back to The Jokers.