In a summer of part-three’s, Ocean’s Thirteen is the best. It’s lean, leaner even than Ocean’s Eleven, and it knows exactly what it’s doing. Most importantly, it also knows how to get where it’s going; in a season marked by glut and rambling one-damn-thing-after-another plots, Ocean’s Thirteen is admirable in its single mindedness. It’s a far cry from greatness, but there’s a certain species of brisk entertainment to be found here. One might even find it refreshing.

The players, numbering five thousand or so, have returned from all points of the globe to seek restitution for a wrong done to one of their own. Reuben Tishkoff (Elliott Gould), he of the fabulously tacky Las Vegas wear, has entered into an unwise partnership with hotel magnate Willie Bank (Al Pacino) against the advice of his good buddy Danny Ocean (George Clooney). True to Ocean’s warning, Bank screws Reuben over and muscles him out of his share of the brand-new casino called, fittingly, The Bank. The shock and threat nearly kill Reuben. Danny decides this is no good, and calls the crew together to ruin both Bank and The Bank.

This is all gotten out of the way within the first 20 minutes, and the other 93 are all about setting up the not-heist and pulling it off. Their plan is ambitious, to say the least; not content to merely rob the place, the Ocean crew figure they’ll rig the casino to lose enough money for Bank to lose his chairmanship. Black jack, craps, slot machines, the works – they’re all going to pay out to the gamblers, and in a big way. And while we’re at it, why not steal Bank’s Five Diamond awards for his previous hotel openings, each valuing somewhere in the neighborhood of $250 million?

Why not indeed. The stakes in Ocean’s Thirteen are so high as to be absurd, but there’s a curious methodology to it all. It’s all grounded – in its reverence for the mythology of Las Vegas, its subdued humor (in which the best lines are stolen for the trailer), its neon- and desert-toned palette. A lot of it’s a a mite too hard to follow, but as in the previous two installments we’re asked to let the charm of the leads sub in for plot coherence. As in Eleven and dramatically unlike Twelve, it works.

Which leads us to one of the big questions about any movie in the Ocean’s franchise: Just how cutely self-satisfied is the whole production, and does the audience feel welcome in watching it? In short, is it charming, or just smug? Eleven straddled the line in a satisfactory fashion, making the audience feel like voyeurs on the most interesting group of people in the world. Twelve was like hearing a random assortment of inside jokes that took over two hours to tell, and thus was almost unbearable. I still break out in hives thinking about it. Thirteen is a lot more the former than the latter, with an added dose of an insider’s feel for what it must be like to run a business as complex and frustrating as a casino. I don’t know how anyone does it.

The performances are what you expect. One gets the impression director Steven Soderbergh’s acting direction sounded something like “think of the coolest person you can possibly imagine, and then be that person.” Except for Don Cheadle, whose sole direction must have been, as in the previous two installments, “find a completely improbable accent and stick to it.” Bernie Mac plays Bernie Mac. But I haven’t told you anything you couldn’t have figured out for yourself, have I?

“More of the same” can be a lethal phrase in a review, but not always. Ocean’s Thirteen certainly falls into that category – given enough time and a few clues, I’m pretty sure you could outline the story exactly how it unfolds on screen. But the magic of the Ocean’s formula – rare, chimerical, far from reliable – is that the whole is worth more than the sum of its parts, and a large part of that is owed to Soderbergh and “the gang.” It’s not great entertainment, but it’s good.