The tricks interlock in prankish, split-second ways, whether it’s the crusty old Jewish pro (Carl Reiner) doing Euro-aristo shtick in order to worm his way into the cage, the pint-size Chinese acrobat (Shaobo Qin) leaping backward over the vault’s electronic alarm floor, or Matt Damon, as a Ripleyesque pickpocket, getting into a riotous staged racial conflagration with wily blackjack dealer Ber-nie Mac. In just about every heist film, from ”Rififi” to ”The Score,” there’s an elaborate centerpiece sequence in which the gang executes some madly impossible feat in order to break through a six-foot steel door or a nuclear security system at that moment, the film inevitably stops in its tracks and says, in essence, ”Ooooh, look at this!” ”Ocean’s Eleven” has more of these audacious gambits than just about any heist film you could name, yet the fun of the movie, and also its slyboots joke, is that the more fantastically elaborate the logistical ruse, the more casual the film is about showcasing it. For all the relationships on screen, their real chemistry is with us. Once again, he shot the movie himself, and the result of this unusually up close and personal mode of directing is that his actors, even in their most tossed-off moments, come across with a vibrant immediacy that seems to emerge from the very grace notes of their personalities. Soderbergh, after the impassioned socio-domestic panorama of ”Traffic,” now goes in the opposite direction, crafting a cinematic layer cake of sheer sugar-high escapism. ”Ocean’s Eleven” has no pretenses, yet it’s a scrumptious and dizzy-spirited lark, a what-the-hell-let’s-rob-the-casino flick made with so much wit and brains and dazzle and virtuosity that the sheer speed and cleverness of the caper hits you like a shot of pure oxygen. He appears to be having the time of his life, and so does everyone in the cast so, I suspect, will the audience. In Ocean’s Eleven, the director, Steven Soderbergh, stages some of the cheekiest, and also the most elegantly complicated, tricks ever seen in a heist film, and he’s in such relaxed, exhilarated command of his medium that he barely works up a sweat.

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