Out of Sight
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.