If you enjoyed last year’s Cash Out, you’ll be pleased to hear that John Travolta is back as Mason Verger. God damn it, I’ve done it again. Travolta is back as Mason Goddard, the sketchy yet somehow loveable professional thief. It’s something of a surprise, too, though not an unpleasant one, because Cash Out was a modestly-budgeted, modestly entertaining “geezer teaser” of the sort that you don’t expect to be revisited, or even remembered, ever again.
But no; Mason returns! And his whole crew, like the cast of the popular Fast and Furious series, return along with him, though his girlfriend/female counterpart Amelia has transformed from the largely forgotten Kristin Davis to the largely forgotten Gina Gershon. And, like the cast of The Fast and the Furious, Mason’s “family” are seemingly always dealing with some new figure who comes along and gets them involved in another heist mission.
This time, the casino setting lends a touch more glamour to proceedings than the gritty and claustrophobic Cash Out, though there’s no more originality to be found. Perhaps there’s even less originality. We get a line (“Waste of a perfectly good cigar”) almost directly lifted from a very good James Bond film – a James Bond film that’s now old enough to be a very good Scotch. For fans of that era of Bond, Travolta also jogs his way through a staircase shootout that simultaneously evokes Daniel Craig’s first and last appearances as 007.
But, unlike certain other recent low-budget thrillers, it’s not Craig!Bond that High Rollers is primarily interested in evoking: the quirky, funky score; golden-yellow cinematography; cast of snarky crooks; smarmy, rich villain; and most obviously, the casino heist plot, are obviously riffing on Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven. This does add up to High Rollers moving with a little more joy than its predecessor, not that ripping off Ocean’s hasn’t been done before. The 2001 classic, already a remake of an earlier film, provided the tone, rhythm and look for a couple of decades of heist pictures, including three official sequels and counting, at least three Now You See Me films, and Soderbergh’s own Logan Lucky, among others. Among this crowd High Rollers does nothing to stand out, but it doesn’t really get anything wrong either, and it’s nice to see that, if Travolta must be reduced to doing films at this level, they’re at least less grim than whatever Bruce Willis or Dolph Lundgren last appeared in.