Ocean's Eleven

The SWAT team are the crooks. The van everyone thinks has the money is a decoy. Everyone gets away with it, although Danny gets a few months for parole violation.

Plot hole: Where do the flyers come from that are in the bags that are carried out of the vault and into the van? Danny and Linus couldn't have taken them down there and there is no room with the Chinese man. They are carried out to the van before the SWAT team appears, which means they'd have to have been in the vault to start with? In the commentary by Steven Soderbergh he acknowledges that there's no explanation. (01:35:05)

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Trivia: The order in which people left the fountain was completely improvised - Steven Soderbergh just told the actors to leave in whatever order they felt was right.

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Question: Benedict goes down to the security center after receiving the call from Rusty that it's being robbed. Benedict tells Mr. Walsh to "make the call" and the "SWAT" team comes in. They tell Benedict to cut the power, then an explosion is set off, and so on. But what Benedict and everyone in the security center are actually seeing is a staged event, though it's all happening at the same time. Even if the "eleven" had timed it down to the last second of how things were going to happen, it would have been lapsed due to the few seconds wasted when Danny and Linus had to change the batteries in the trigger for the vault. So, I guess my question is, what are the chances that the tape and actual events would run in time together?

Answer: The battery-related delay doesn't matter - Rusty doesn't call Benedict until after the vault has been successfully breached. Up to that point, Livingston is simply running a looped image of the undisturbed vault. Only once Benedict has reached the control room does the tape of the fake vault start running. This just shows the preparation of the bags and the robbers generally wandering around the vault. Danny and co, down in the vault, would know how roughly long to leave it from the start of the tape to sending the bags up, and they know that the tape will start within a few minutes of them breaching the vault, so that's no real problem, timing-wise. The fake SWAT team show up and head down the liftshaft to the vault area. They then tell Benedict to cut all power to the vault, which he does, and all his screens showing what's going on go blank. During that time, they throw an explosive into the vault and it detonates. When Benedict brings the power back up, he's not looking at the tape any more - he's now seeing real images from the vault cameras. At no point is split-second timing required, nor do they have to worry about the tape being out of time with real events.

Tailkinker

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