Very early Soderbergh, and you can see a couple blueprints here: his penchant for crime/heist stories with jump-cutting timelines, his love for Clooney (who I think does a terrific proto-Clooney performance, with all the charisma in the world but not quite the "I am playing myself, George Clooney" swagger that makes it hard to take his later work seriously), a over-willingness to play with color grading and cross-fades. It's a fun movie that I had a good time with even if it doesn't quite commit to being pure style + pomp (see: Ocean's Eleven) or pure grit (see: No Sudden Move).

It does nail a couple things, though: the chemistry between Clooney and Lopez is both well-lampshaded in the trunk scene and delightful in their little hotel bar montage (it's hard to make the romantic elements of these things work, and that was my least favorite part of Three Days of the Condor, but it absolutely worked in that scene), the ending, the surgical deployment of Ving Rhames.

★★★★