Ocean's Twelve (2004)
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Ocean's Eleven, the 2001 remake of an old Frank Sinatra heist movie, was one of the more entertaining blockbusters of recent years. With an all-star cast and a talented director it was a slick and clever piece of escapist entertainment. Not exactly the sort of thing likely to trouble the Academy Awards, but still highly entertaining. It did very well at the box-office, so it was inevitable that a sequel would appear, and here it is. It would be a hard job to live up to the first film; sadly Ocean’s Twelve doesn’t even come close.
It starts off promisingly enough, with vengeful casino owner Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia) tracking down the original eleven, now enjoying their ill-gotten gains in semi-retirement. Benedict threatens them, that if they don’t repay the money they stole from his casino (with sizeable interest), they will regret it. In a nice piece of script-writing Benedict doesn’t make any specific threat, instead we’re left to assume (as the characters do) that he is more than capable of making them regret their actions. The reunited gang decide that their only option is to decamp to Europe (where they will be less likely to be recognised than in the US) where they attempt a series of clever robberies to try and get the money to pay Benedict. Unfortunately, they have several problems, particularly superior French thief Toulour (Vincent Cassel) who has an irritating habit of stealing their targets before they can, and cunning Interpol agent Isabel Lahiri (Catherine Zeta-Jones). To complicate things further, Lahiri is a former lover of heist planner Rusty Ryan (Brad Pitt), and the gang have an unfortunate tendency to squabble among themselves.
So far, so good. The scene is set for an entertaining hest movie to unfold. Unfortunately, this is where the script starts to unravel and the plot gets increasingly incomprehensible. By the end of the movie, once a few last-minute explanations have been made, it sort of makes sense, but as the movie progresses there are an increasing number of bizarre plot decisions, strange character motivations that fail to make sense at the most basic level, and some spectacularly ill-judged attempts at comedy plotting (Tess Ocean (Julia Roberts) has to pretend to be well-known Hollywood star Julia Roberts in an attempt to pull of an unlikely heist plan). It all goes horribly wrong. Except that it doesn’t, because the characters weren’t doing what we thought they were doing. Indeed, most of the movie is utterly pointless with the gang making a complicated but rather dull attempt to steal a treasure that they’ve actually already stolen. In fact, for what is supposedly a heist movie, there is very little heisting going on. The only thing to match the intricately plotted casino robbery of the first film is a short but impressive sequence where Vincent Cassel dances through laser-beams in a high-security museum room.
There are more than the titular twelve major characters in this movie, but few of them really have much to do. Danny Ocean (George Clooney), Ryan and pickpocket Linus Cauldwell (Matt Damon) get most of the work, but the rest of the gang are reduced to almost being glorified cameos. Andy Garcia’s casino owner is particularly wasted with Vincent Cassel’s shallow gentleman thief not being anywhere near as effective as the film’s main antagonist. Zeta-Jones does reasonably well, but Julia Roberts is mostly reduced to some embarrassingly bad comedy. There are some good star cameos from people outside of the main gang – principally Eddie Izzard’s eccentric technology expert and Robbie Coltrane’s equally eccentric informant. The main cast don’t seem to be trying too hard, just coasting along, few of them managing to rise above the rather muddled script.
The direction and soundtrack are all reliably slick, but they can’t distract from the fundamental weakness of the script. It is almost as if Soderbergh is trying to distract from the central problems of the story by making it as confusing to follow as possible in the hope that people won’t see the gaping plot holes.
In summary, this is a reasonably entertaining film, but it is confused, unconvincing, and nowhere near as good as Ocean’s 11 was.
Rating : 6 / 10
All content ©2003 William Marnoch.
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