OCEAN’S 14
Brad Pitt’s family business, renting umbrellas and beach chairs on the Mississippi coast has just gone under. They’re hurting and they want revenge. Pitt calls Danny Ocean and the two of them come up with a plan.
For 30 minutes, we check in with the gang, finding out what everyone’s been up to since they destroyed Al Pacino in 2007. There is also an incredibly beautiful geologist that they bring on board.
Then we find out the plan. Turns out that Tony Hayward from BP has just set up a new super-drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico. A normal platform costs about $500 million, but they’ve spent $10 billion on this one because it houses a new horizontal drilling technology that will let BP drink up oil for a hundred miles in every direction. They’re going to put their competitors out of business. Drink their milkshakes, if you will.
This drilling technology is so important that security on this rig is incredibly tight. Not only that, it’s in the middle of the ocean. Danny makes a pun about this. So what’s the objective? We’re going to steal the oil first.
The plot is full of twists and turns but it boils down to this: Matt Damon is in disguise as a nebbishy government regulator. Saul pretends to be a German insurance magnate who is willing to insure the rig. Bernie Mac gets hired on as a roughneck. Reuben buys them a boat. Brad Pitt stands on said yacht, eats and looks cool. Then he has the moron twins paint it to look like a Coast Guard vessel and uses it to take control of a just emptied supertanker in the port of New Orleans.
The moron twins get to drive the supertanker and a miniature submarine. Livingston hacks into the GPS system to hide the supertanker from the world. Yen has to climb down a mile deep oil pipeline to connect to a secondary pipeline that feeds the supertanker. Basher has to use that giant drill from when they dug the Chunnel, this time underneath the Gulf of Mexico. Danny shows up, is immediately recognized as a con man, and yet is allowed to walk around unimpeded for the rest of the film.
The drill starts going. As it reaches the depth at which they expect to find oil, Bernie Mac manages to cause an accident that stops the drilling. Yen, snuck on board hidden in Matt Damon’s scientific equipment, starts climbing down the pipe. He only has one hour. When he gets to the bottom, he helps attach a secondary pipe that leads to the stolen supertanker through a diagonal hole that Basher has been drilling (presumably for several months). The two of them set a few small explosive charges around the drill bit, leave the Chunnel drill running on auto, then take off in the mini-sub.
When the drill restarts, the explosives go off, sealing the well from the platform while breaking through the final feet of rock, leaving the team’s diagonal pipe the only one able to access the oil. As the BP platform makes repairs, the team siphons oil into the Supertanker. Just as the tanker fills up, the Chunnel drill hits one of the supports for the platform which experiences what feels like an earthquake before sinking into the water.
On his helicopter circling the sinking rig, Tony Hayward calls his insurance agent only to find that Saul had no connection to the German firm.
The gang meets on the supertanker. They’ve sealed their pipe, so there’s no oil leaking anywhere. BP just went bankrupt and as soon as they can sell their tanker full of oil to the North Koreans, they’ll all be filthy rich. They stand by the railing, watching as the burning oil rig sinks into the ocean. Sinatra plays.
THE END
To my mind, these scenarios are far more satisfying than anything we’ve seen from the government so far. Clearly, criminals are the way to go. What heroic outlaws would you like to see take on BP? How would they do it?
One problem with the Ocean’s 14 plan. Bernie Mac is dead. Here is a short list of African American actors to replace him in the same role, presumably playing a brother, cousin, or other relative.
Jim Brown (good in Mars Attacks and many other action type movies)
Cedric the Entertainer (would be more convincing faking a accident)
Fred Williamson
You don’t have to replace him with a African American actor, but I can’t see Hollywood doing anything else. Unless they went for another “minority”, say, Hispanic. But then who do you pick? Ooh…Danny Trejo? I just say him because I really like him as actor and wish he’d get more non-bad guy roles…
In the Ocean’s 11 scenario, are you trying to say that BP’s evil plan involves DRAINAGE!!! DRAINAGE ELI!!!!
Maybe the crew from The Italian Job could take the oil spill on, but there would have to be a safe involved, otherwise Charlize Theron would be more or less useless.
First off, thanks to Mr. Belinkie for thinking through this with me. Thanks also to Mr. Fenzel, who had a couple of great suggestions that I forgot include. Sorry Pete. Here they are – commenters, add your own.
Human Target – Christopher Chance signs on as bodyguard to a southern louisiana environmentalist, disguising himself as the environmentalist’s pet pelican. Meanwhile, Guerrero creeps out and harasses the IT team that handles BP’s e-mail servers, discovering BP’s plan to scuttle a supertanker in the gulf of mexico, devastating the last clean beaches in the Mississippi delta, and drowning its main political enemies in oil. But when Christopher Chance gets to the beach first, wings spread and a decoy oil-soaked fish in his mouth, the spiller is about to become the spill-ee.
It is not exactly clear how this happens in the second-to-last scene but it looks awesome.
Prison Break – Michael Schofield is a former commercial fisherman living in Mobile Alabama. Ridden with credit card debt, with his compensation from BP caught up in legal appeals, and with no reasonable hope for near-term employment, the show follows Michael’s attempts to escape Mobile – his only help, his alcoholic, belligerent brother and the tattoos of the Alabama economy he has all over his body.
Oh, and I imagine that Bernie Mac could be added in through the miracle of CGI.
:( this was kind of sad. Even mastermind criminals can’t really make BP pay for what they’ve done, or put any effort into a clean-up.
Great job, well thought through (no doubt more so than the plans of Beyond Petroleum), entertaining and no doubt inspiring some real world Danny Oceans to clean up their namesakes. Also, I am glad the requisite TWBB reference was inserted correctly.
I guess the Hustle team would do their best to sell that section of the ocean to some random Middle Eastern oil barons, as well as some technology to extract it from the water. As usual, Ash would be the only one to do any work, and Albert would impersonate a senator.
Love this. Go the A-Team. My personal preference is for things to be resolved 80s style… We all live happily ever after, and no-one really gets hurt anyway…
I’m sure the Eliot feels left out of the Leverage plan ;) He could be posing as a waiter at the party and glare at Haywood from across the room or be Sophie’s PA.
“Leverage and Burn Notice, however, take place in Boston and Miami, respectively, and consistently demonstrate that the government can’t be trusted to protect its own citizens on its own soil. On top of that, villainous corporations have become a more frequent villain than the drug cartels of the 80′s or the terrorists of the early part of the decade. Corporations step on the little guy and the government is powerless to help.”
While I agree that Burn Notice demonstrates the uselessness of the government or calling in law enforcement, I think the drug cartels and terrorists are more often than not the villains on Burn Notice. The villains on the show usually fall under the category of drug dealer, mobster, organized crime boss, or vague sinister professional without ties to the government making most of their activities terrorist-like. There aren’t too many corporations as far as I can tell…
Other than that, great article. I think the A-Team plan would work best because somehow it seems the most realistic…not quite sure how I came to that conclusion.
Perhaps we could compile a team. An aquatic superhero, a brilliant scientist, a marine biologist, and someone wealthy enough to throw a lot of money and resources their way.
So Aquaman, Will Magnus, Orca, and Bruce Wayne?
Orrrr,… Namor, Reed Richards, Caleb Alexander, and Tony Stark?
Jean-Michel Cousteau gets tangled in the fishing net he’s removing from a dolphin’s fins. A cloud of oil surrounds him just as the dolphin escapes, and as he reaches the last of his oxygen, a storm moves in – lightning strikes the metal floaty-thing at the top of the net, frying his system and mutating his DNA, combining it with the baby sea-turtle and clownfish also caught in the net. Suddenly, Jean-Michel Cousteau is the Crustacean: He has gills, fins, super-strength, laser vision, a hard shell covering his spine, and a way with the ladies. He quickly hooks up with Nemo (hacker), Spongebob (engineer), and Ariel (whatever), to avenge and protect the largest population on earth, and their homes: The citizens of the ocean. First stop: BP and that despicable open well in the GoM.
If the oil endangered some mermaids or a society of sponges, BP would have to contend with the Sanctuary team. No one messes with Helen Magnus!
Henry and Tesla would construct something to stop the leaks but before they finish, Will realises that Tesla sabotaged the rig in the first place and it’s all part of his latest bid for global domination. Kate surprises everyone by coming up with a clever plan that helps save the day. The Big Guy thanks her with his typical affectionate head-whack.
Love this. Made even better with the fact that the A-Team movie is coming out. I love all the other suggestions of who can save the day out of the land of TV.