Review
OCEAN’S TWELVE
Starring George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Matt Damon
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
Opens Friday, December 10
Check listings
In his anticipated and equally star-heavy sequel to Ocean’s Eleven, director Steven Soderbergh takes his cheeky band of thieves on a European romp that goes wrong somewhere between Amsterdam and Rome. Tripping up on its own smugness, Ocean’s Twelve isn’t as finely tuned, amusing or satisfying as the original remake. Touting the film as an event that literally realigns the stars (the Hollywood kind, that is) – in the press notes it’s duly noted that getting the schedules of Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts and George Clooney to coincide is impossible – Ocean’s Twelve doesn’t offer much more than its bankable names.
Picking up three after years after the first film left off, Ocean’s Twelve begins with a snapshot into the not-so-thrilling lives of the titular gang. Scattered about the country, Rusty (Pitt) has become an unsuccessful hotel manager in Las Vegas, Virgil (Casey Affleck) has become a fiancé in Provo, Utah and Danny (Clooney) has become a shifty suburbanite with his now-wife Tess (Julia Roberts) in Hartford, Connecticut. When Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia) locates the men who robbed him, he sends a bleak directive their way: return the amount they stole, with interest, in two weeks or die.
With that in mind, the crew reassembles and heads to Europe, first toAmsterdam and then Rome, because they’re too well-known to pull off any heists on American soil. Once abroad, they start planning a series of thefts to get enough money together to repay their hefty debt, only to find they’re being cased by another thief. Given a challenge by the French mastermind known only as the Night Fox, Ocean’s Twelve has to pull off their most elaborate crime yet, to save their skins.
A comedy of errors where everything seemingly goes wrong for the gang – from losing luggage holding one of their crew members to getting nabbed by the police – Ocean’s Twelve really falls apart in its third act. Unlike the first film, where all of the characters’ elaborate roles in the heist are intricately and slowly revealed, many of the leads don’t have much to do here. This time around there’s seemingly no difference between the weapons expert and the pickpocket, since no one has a very specific role in the big heist. And, although there is a nice cat-and-mouse aspect of the film as Rusty is pursued by his ex-girlfriend (Catherine Zeta Jones), a European detective who specializes in catching flashy, non-violent thieves, even this subplot is ultimately driven into the ground.
At the risk of having to issue a spoiler alert (in other words, don’t read on if you don’t want certain plot twists revealed), it needs to be said that Ocean’s Twelve pulls one of the strangest and most idiotic cinematic tricks in recent memory. Playing out a botched heist scheme, Soderbergh has Roberts’ character pretend to be the real Julia Roberts in order to get celebrity access to the coveted Fabergé egg the gang is trying to steal. While it is established that Tess bears a striking resemblance to Julia, it’s not established why she’s the exception to the rule. Why doesn’t Clooney’s character look like George Clooney? Or Damon’s for that matter? Breaking the basic rules of storytelling to garner a few yuks – isn’t it funny to see Roberts’s character stuff her dress with a pillow and talk about how she loves Julia Roberts? – Soderbergh takes the film ridiculously off-course. What might have, in another film (say Soderbergh’s narcissistically hollow take on Hollywood, Full Frontal), been a postmodern dig at the divide between an actor and a celebrity is turned into a circus trick that panders to the lowest common denominator. |
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