“There’s a code among guys that shook Sinatra’s hand.”

When scheming hotelier Willy Bank (Al Pacino) cheats Reuben Tishkoff (Elliott Gould) out of his fifty percent interest in a lavish new Las Vegas hotel-casino so ruthlessly that the man suffers a debilitating heart attack, Reuben’s friends come together to enact revenge against the corrupt mogul. Returning the action to Sin City after a postmodern vacation abroad in Ocean’s Twelve, the third entry in Steven Soderbergh’s series sees Danny Ocean (George Clooney) and company (Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, Bernie Mac, Casey Affleck, Scott Caan, Eddie Jemison, Shaobo Qin, Carl Reiner) realizing an elaborate and outlandish heist that involves not only rigging the games of chance, but ruining the hotel’s reputation and stealing a priceless diamond collection as well.

Though Julia Roberts’ Tess (the twelfth member of Ocean’s gang in the previous film) does not return, recurring nemesis Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia) and master thief Roman Nagel (Eddie Izzard) join the effort to bring the team’s number up to the sequence-appropriate total. Clooney and Pitt are the dual centerpoints of the action, arranging their pieces in a multidimensional chess match that requires them to outsmart an artificially intelligent security system. The undertaking is expansive and thorough—Saul Bloom (Reiner) poses as an anonymous hotel reviewer while the real critic (David Paymer) is beset by a procession of unpleasantries; Virgil Malloy (Affleck) and then his brother Turk (Caan) are sent to the Mexican dice factory to add a certain chemical to a specific batch; Basher (Cheadle) commandeers the drilling machine that bored the Chunnel and uses it to simulate an earthquake; Linus (Damon) wears a fake nose and seduces Bank’s personal assistant (Ellen Barkin).

For better or worse, instead of showing the buildup, Brian Koppelman and David Levein’s screenplay unleashes a bunch of schemes in rapid succession, each of them clicking into place at the moment of execution. We pick up bits and pieces along the way, but we do not get that special feeling of all of the details coming together at once that marks the best sting films.

Though far-fetched, thematically barren, and emotionally inert, Soderbergh constructs Ocean’s Thirteen with a lively style that perfectly suits the material—chewing gum for the eyes and ears, as Rosenbaum calls it. Oversaturated colors, hip jazz music (David Holmes), and splitscreen define the aesthetic, while crafty editing, montage, and narration allow the film to flit amongst the team with minimal confusion. This playfulness in the filmmaking fits the banter-laden screenplay and the cast’s camaraderie like a glove and allows a viewer who refuses to treat the trilogy as some kind of epic saga to go with the flow as it churns through its myriad in-jokes. It’s ultimately an empty exercise in nostalgia that doesn’t take many chances, but it’s still terrifically entertaining.