Ocean's Twelve

I first want to apologize for posting this late for I was out for about the whole day. Let’s not waste any time and start my review on “Ocean’s Twelve,” released in 2004.

Josh Bell started off his review by saying, “Steven Soderbergh's 2001 remake of the Rat Pack caper flick Ocean's Eleven was a light, fun romp with little substance but plenty of style, an excuse for big-name actors like George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon and Julia Roberts to play dress-up and prance around Las Vegas as cool, suave thieves. Coming on the heels of serious, intelligent Soderbergh films like Erin Brockovich and Traffic, Ocean's Eleven was a bit of a trifle, but it was an exceedingly well-made trifle, and a ton of fun to watch.”

“Ocean’s Twelve,” Soderbergh’s 2004 sequel, is not a lot of fun to watch. It may have been fun to direct – the actors spend their time smiling and laughing at one another, and the movie was filmed in several gorgeous European locales – but it’s a difficult movie-going experience, full of pointless in-jokes, with a terrible 130-minute running time and more characters that you can possibly keep up with. There are a few laughs occasionally, but they’re little comfort among the stupid plot and aimless set pieces.

A little over three years after stealing $150 million from Las Vegas casino owner Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia going way overboard with the villain chatter in this sequel), Danny Ocean and his team are having a great life with their loot, when suddenly Benedict locates all 11 members and issues a threat: Pay him back all his money, with interest, in two weeks, or they will be murdered.

So the entire team reunites, led by Danny and his right-hand man Rusty. Too infamous to work in the U.S., they fly to Europe, where they first plan to steal a rare historical document from an outsider. However, they are stopped by two enemies: police detective Isabel Lahiri (the drop dead gorgeous Latina that Nostalgia Critic is crazy over, Catherine Zeta-Jones), who once was in a relationship with Rusty, and a master thief called the Nightfox (Vincent Cassel), who hates Ocean and his team for becoming bigger stars than he is.

Unlike the first movie, which focused on one big plot, the sequel shows several smaller plots that never play out as planned. As a result, a film about thieves has very little stealing, as writer George Nolfi focuses instead on plot twists that come out of nowhere and leave the viewer puzzled rather than open-minded. Bell noted, “Nolfi's script originally had nothing to do with the Ocean's characters, and the retrofitting certainly shows.” The Benedict connection to the first movie comes off as little more than an excuse to get the characters to Europe, and many characters traits feel ill-suited to the people we got to know in the first film.

Matt Damon’s immature Linus Caldwell gets a bigger role this time, and the biggest addition is Zeta-Jones as Isabel. Where the first movie was all about Danny trying to get back Tess from Benedict, this one is all about Rusty trying to get back Isabel from the control of respectability. Brad Pitt and George Clooney, who sold a comfortable, long-standing friendship between their two characters in the first movie, get only one convincing scene together this time around. Or else, it’s like Danny and Rusty are working on two separate ways.

Bell goes on to say, “It's possible that Nolfi's initial treatment had the core of a good thriller, but it's been stretched so far to accommodate the Ocean's characters that whatever might have been exciting about it is no longer recognizable. The filmmakers seem unsure of what kind of movie they're making, and instead of sticking to the stylish thievery antics that gave Eleven its charm, they throw in self-indulgent Hollywood in-jokes, including an awful, interminable sequence in which Roberts' Tess must pose as Julia Roberts to facilitate a theft.” Julia Roberts, as a character imitating herself, runs into a Bruce Willis cameo, who mistakes the character for the real Roberts, and at one moment calls Roberts on the phone, so that Tess can talk to Roberts herself (doing her own voice). It’s enough for you to rip the hairs out of your head.

I think Bell said it best when he said, “Furthermore, it's smugly, annoyingly self-congratulatory, the kind of meta-textual nonsense that critics hated in Soderbergh's experimental Full Frontal (which also featured Roberts in a role skewering her own personality). At least there it was in context, as the whole film was about the self-reflexive nature of storytelling. Here, it's just jarring and narcissistic, an especially wrong note in a movie full of wrong notes.”

It’s difficult to get too furious about, though, since none of the movie pieces together, anyway. Soderbergh directs the film like he’s bored, throwing in freeze frames, wipes, adorable titles and strange camera angles just to keep himself awake. He’s a successful stylist, but the style doesn’t have a purpose here. Like the rest of the film, it looks like fun, but the audience is never in on the joke.

Overall, the beginning is slow, the plot is just a clichéd revenge story that we’ve seen so many times before (and why did he wait three years to locate and threatened the team), and the final twist that really hurts the final action sequence. Soderbergh actually admitted that this was his favorite amongst the trilogy, but I personally think it’s the weakest. But I don’t think that this is one of the worst sequels ever made, because there are good things about it, even though there are more cons than pros. Check it out, but you will not enjoy this one as much as the first one.

Well, look out for Monday when I look at the Murphy “The Nutty Professor” sequel.