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Out of Sight Movie Review

Out of Sight is a 1998 crime comedy film directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez. It’s a sexy, but thinly plotted flick.

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“Oh, man, if I wasn’t stoned,

there is no way you would have talked me into this!“

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A bank robber escapes prison and comes across a female marshal. Things go downhill when he kidnaps her and she starts falling for him. This movie represents everything that is wrong with Soderbergh – he makes films that are stylish and somewhat entertaining, but usually there is nothing going on in the brain department. He rarely manages to elevate his material either emotionally or thematically. It’s all very pedestrian.

This particular storyline did not appeal to me in the slightest. I did like the central romance, but everything else either did not fit the movie tonally or was very forgettable, especially the crime elements. Most of the supporting characters are uninteresting, though Don Cheadle and Ving Rhames did their best with their decidedly inferior roles.

As for the romance, that element definitely worked. Again, even these two characters did not receive a whole lot of development, but at least the actors are great and both delivered in spades. The sexual scenes are sizzling, and both Lopez and Clooney are very sexy in this film and they never probably have looked better than they looked here.

I actually find Lopez to be a very underrated actress as she is genuinely talented, but she’s rarely received credit for her work, which is unfortunate. She is very believable in this role and exhibiting true star quality. Of course, Clooney is reliably charismatic and his winning smile made him very attractive. The film is fantastic when it focuses on these two, but whenever it shifted focus on the other characters, it lost me.

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Out of Sight is slick, well shot, very well scored and also solidly executed in its action scenes, which I still found overlong as I am not the biggest fan of shootouts, but they were fine in technical merits. Some of the dialogue is quite good. Still, whether talking about the journey or the destination, I simply did not care for this story as I found it very irrelevant and slim.