Originally posted 12/15/04
Ocean’s Twelve
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Writer: George Nolfi, based on characters created by George Clayton Johnson and Jack Golden Russell
Producer: Jerry Weintraub
Stars: George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Matt Damon, Andy Garcia, Vincent Cassel, Bernie Mac, Don Cheadle, Scott Caan, Casey Affleck, Elliot Gould, Carl Reiner, Shaobo Qin, Eddie Jemison
There is the heist movie where we root for our heroes to pull it off, then there is the one where we realize with dread that they won’t get away with it. Ocean’s Eleven, the 2001 remake of the 1960 Rat Pack vehicle about knocking over a Vegas casino, was the former, as is this sequel. Watching with faith that our heroes will somehow come out on top, our enjoyment lies in the discovery of details – details about how impossible the job is, and the details of how they overcome those impossibilities.
The details in the first effort from Clooney and the gang were impeccable – every member of the “Eleven” had a clear task to attend to, and the heist they pulled off was paced well and enjoyably ridiculous while keeping that single all-important stretching toe on the line of plausibility. Like good soul music, you could enjoy the style because the groove was locked in tight. But in Ocean’s Twelve, after going through the motions of reassembling the entire crew, the story labors heavily to keep track of them all, and eventually resorts to just throwing increasing numbers of them in jail to lessen confusion.
If it feels as if they’ve been grafted onto a story that cannot hold their weight, it’s because this is exactly what happened – George Nolfi’s script, originally titled Honor Among Thieves, was set up for John Woo to direct. These characters were dropped in after the financial failure of director Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris and Clooney’s directing debut Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (both underrated and worth a look) made this sequel what an agent would call “smart business”. At least they decided to have some fun in fulfilling this obligation, but unfortunately not all of that fun is passed along to the audience.
In the beginning, the object was to take down slimy casino magnate Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia). But there was an emotional quest involved too; it was a way for Danny Ocean (Clooney) to demonstrate his love for ex-wife Tess (Julia Roberts), and in the end you could appreciate the design of both story threads. Now we open with Benedict tracking down the people who robbed him, one by one, and demanding his $160 million back, with interest.
He gives them two weeks to do this, but the deadline is utterly arbitrary, since it never precludes our gang from anything they want to do, be it shuttling across several countries in Europe or finding the right equipment to lift a house from underwater. In the process of finding big-dollar heists to pull off on short notice, they learn not only who gave their identities to Benedict, but why.
And then the story ceases to be about Benedict at all, but about a slimy French cat burglar named the Night Fox (Vincent Cassel), a legendary retired thief named La Marque, and the aborted fling between Ocean right-hand man Rusty Ryan (Brad Pitt) and Interpol detective Isabel Lahiri (Catherine Zeta-Jones). These are likely the main players in the movie that would have been Honor Among Thieves, and they look like they don’t realize that they have been demoted to the rank of pretext.
In this day and age it’s an impressive feat just to assemble so much star-wattage in one movie. Clearly the lure was a chance to reunite for the laughs they enjoyed before, and go to beautiful cities and wear smashing clothes and say witty things and just generally celebrate their own amazing-ness.
I have no objection to that on principle, it was part of the charm of the first. Director Soderbergh is still a master of staging and rhythm, and in acting as his own director of photography (as always, under the pseudonym “Peter Andrews”) he uses natural lighting and rich color to stunning effect. The scenery, primarily Amsterdam and Rome, is to die for and everyone does indeed dress well. The collective charms of the cast do manage to carry things along for longer than you might think, although with the number of cameos it does have a clowns-tumbling-out-of-a-Volkswagon effect after awhile.
But eventually your own smile wears off, and you realize that these people you paid to entertain you are now focused entirely on entertaining themselves. Ironically, the most laughs-per-minute of screen time goes to Chinese acrobat and non-actor Shaobo Qin, who re-defines the problem of lost luggage.
The second half of the movie wobbles and lists under a series of surprises and double-crosses, and without giving too much away I must say that in the end the audience is fundamentally cheated. We’re subjected to that tired device where we stop the movie so the actors can grin and tell us what really happened. A good heist movie inspires us to think along with the gang. A bad heist movie prevents us from thinking then condescends to us about what we didn’t know.
And our glamorous movie stars are too preoccupied with kidding each other about how beautiful and rich and successful they are to do anything about it – in an extended cameo, yet another huge movie star comes along and gets to brag about the worldwide box office gross of his biggest hit (really, Bruno, do we care?).
If at this point you are asking what any of this has to do with a heist, you are asking the question that sticks the knife right into this ultimately wearying movie, a reunion party that just drags on too long. The end scenes involve our triumphant gang getting together for a night of poker, and I was disappointed to conclude I would rather have watched two hours of that.