Watch Out of Sight For Free

Such a frustrating disappointment

Just perfect...

Beautiful, moving film.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

It's not that Out of Sight is some sort of monumental motion picture, however, it's a perfectly harmless feature film that entertains from beginning to end. It's one of Steven Soderbergh's more dated films, being that it was made 20 years ago, but it's also one of the sharpest in terms of dialogue and performances.On the outside, the romance between Jennifer Lopez and George Clooney is flooded with clichés. An under-appreciated FBI agent falls for the very guy she's trying to take down. It's been done a thousand times over, and it's not like this time it's all that groundbreaking. But their romance is well-acted on both sides. Clooney does as good as he can playing bad-boy Jack Foley, but I'm not sure I can ever accept that face of his as an antagonist. And Lopez, who isn't known for her acting, is actually quite good as Karen Sisco.Unsurprisingly for a Soderbergh film, the cast as a whole is phenomenal. Clooney, Lopez, Cheadle, Zahn, Rhames, Keener, Farina, Brooks, Davis, Keaton, and the one and only Samuel L. Jackson round out one of the best ensemble casts of all time. The best part is, no one takes their jobs too seriously, but well enough to be effective.As I previously mentioned, Soderbergh's directing is a little dated. Part of it is because the way films were made in the 90's was way different than it is now. For one, the music they used seemed like something out of a cheesy adult film. I mean that in the most respectful way possible, it's just the vibe I got from it. The editing is also something I couldn't entirely get behind. It's obviously intentional on Soderbergh's part, but the weird pauses in shots before transitions to a new scene just seemed weird.With that said, Out of Sight is undeniably fun, smart, and re- watchable. There isn't a whole lot more you can ask from a movie. It's no Oceans' Eleven, but it's definitely something worth watching.7.7/10

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

George Clooney's protagonist Jack Foley, is a handsome and extremely charming guy, an incurable romantic, not an advocate of violence and has the proclivity for being a modern-day knight errant, so maybe, bank-robbing is not such a fancy profession for him, but actually, he does it pretty well. In the opening scenes, it is all easy-breezy for him to talk through a young female bank clerk to give him the cash, only his exit plan hits a snag.During his prison-break, Jack and his loyal partner Buddy (Rhames) hold hostage Karen Sisco (Lopez), a U.S. Marshal, a burgeoning romance has been kindled between Jack and Karen, when they squeeze together inside the trunk of the vehicle on the exit route, the closeness of a confined space really works as a hotbed for sexual attraction, and they are talking about movies about Faye Dunaway and Robert Redford along the way.Karen manages to escape later, but becomes involuntarily preoccupied with him, she follows all the leads to track him down, and finally in Detroit, their simmering affections evolve into one night of passion, but Jack's real intention is to steal some uncut diamonds from a Wall Street millionaire, Richard Ripley (Brooks), a fellow prisoner whom Jack and Buddy have met three years ago. In order to furthermore strengthen that Jack is the bad guy we are rooting for, Maurice Miller (Cheadle) is introduced, a ruthless murderer, who is also eyeing for the diamonds, with his two underlings, a cretin White Boy Bob (Loneker) and a former boxer Kenneth (Washington). The climax is a home invasion with a taut suspense and a pretty up-tp-scratch happy ending.OUT OF SIGHT is Sundance wunderkind Soderbergh's seventh feature film and his first dalliance with mainstream production (for Universal), it becomes a critical success with 2 Oscar-nominations (for editing and screenplay), the editing job of Anne V. Coates is essential to integrate the intentionally disarranged story lines to a hipster fashion which perks up the golden-hearted criminal cliché; Scott Frank's adapted screenplay puts much weight on the comedic fodder out of the dangerous work from its source novel; also ornamented by a posh soundtrack and frisky cameos from Michael Keaton - who reincarnate as Ray Nicolette from Tarantino's JACKIE BROWN 1997, another Elmore Leonard's adaptation - and Samuel L. Jackson, as the kindred spirit inmate of Jack in the code. In retrospect, it has become a breakthrough for Clooney, who radiates both civilised sophistication and childlike nonchalance, a symbol of Clooney's own raw sex appeal in its peak, and incredibly heats up the screen with Jennifer Lopez, whose often problematic acting aptitude magically works this time. Don Cheadle gives a committed impression in the villain default, and it is always nice to see Catherine Keener and Viola Davis on the screen, but personally I find Steve Zahn's outstanding portrayal of Glenn Michaels, Jack and Buddy's cowardly partner-in-crime, stands out eventually, it is a sidekick who doesn't usually deserve our compassion or even attention, but Zahn supplies him with rather empathetic efforts to cement his feelings: fumbling frustration, palpable fear and an expedient sense of desperation.

I can see why "Out of Sight" is one of George Clooney's favourite films on his resume. Even though it didn't do very well box-office wise, it is a really good film with a great screenplay. Based on the novel of the same name by Elmore Leonard and excellently directed by Steven Soderbergh it's a joy.Plot In A Paragraph: An escaped convict (George Clooney) takes a female US Marshall (Jennifer Lopez) hostage whilst making a get away. They share an instant mutual attraction and it's not long before their paths cross again.Clooney and Lopez make a very sexy couple and the famous trunk scene is superb. I can't praise the cast enough of this movie enough here. George Clooney is at his charismatic best. Ving Rhames is solid support while Jennifer Lopez who I'm not really a fan of looks gorgeous and does a good job acting wise. Dennis Farina pops up as her Dad, and is as reliable as he always is. Michael Keaton reprises his role from "Jackie Brown" and seems to be having a lot of fun doing do so. Steve Zahn does his usual Steve Zahn routine, but here it works. Don Cheadle is also very good. This is the first collaboration between Soderbergh and star George Clooney, and give how well they worked together it's no surprise they re teamed several more times.