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Overall Rating
  Awesome: 6.82%
Worth A Look: 15.15%
Average: 34.09%
Pretty Bad: 34.09%
Total Crap: 9.85%
12 reviews, 60 user ratings
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| Ocean's Twelve |
by Erik Childress
"Know How Twelve Is A Crap Hand In Blackjack?"
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The beauty of the Ocean’s Eleven remake was that it was more than just a pre-packaged multi-star vehicle. It had been years since so many moviestars got together to appear in the same motion picture without breaking the salary cap. George Clooney had friends and Steven Soderbergh had more than enough respect to close the deal. As a bonus, it boasted a slick style and a consummate screenplay full of wit and twists. It remains a pleasure to this day. It’s great success destined it to receive a sequel. To maintain all of the original players is some kind of minor miracle, but the result is one of the most phoned-in, disappointing ventures I’ve seen in a long time and I drove home from it quite angry.In an interesting twist of events, arch-villain Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia) has caught up to the Ocean gang. We’re re-introduced to all the majors as he tracks them down and offers them two weeks to repay what they stole (plus interest) or lose the game of life. Considering that the final shot of the original insinuated that Benedict would be trailing these guys for the rest of their lives, it’s odd that he would have needed some outside help to connect the final dots. (Even less likelier that the guy who bankrupted entire families at the mere thought of impropriety towards him would be so forgiving this go around; even with an enormous profit margin.) Nevertheless it’s a phone call from a master thief known as the Nightfox (Vincent Cassel) who drops dime on them. Why? Now you’ll love this. Because someone thought Danny Ocean (George Clooney) was a better thief than he was. Oh boy – it’s the old pissing honor amongst thieves and haven’t we seen that before ad nauseum.
Too hot to work in the states, the whole gang trots off to Amsterdam at the suggestion of Rusty (Brad Pitt). It couldn’t be that he still carries a flame for his old cop girlfriend, Isabel (Catherine Zeta-Jones), who works there, right? The comic possibilities of Rusty doing this to one-up his partner for staging a heist of his ex-wife (Julia Roberts) the first go-round is completely lost, not the least of which because Zeta thinks she’s in an actual movie and not just one concocted as an excuse to party-up in Italy.
Here I could reveal the outlines of their big plans or choose not to reveal to maintain its secrecy, except there isn’t a whole helluva lot to reveal. There’s a small heist, an attempted larger heist and a major heist that occurred at some point and kept away from the audience until a late reveal which helps fuel how little effort actually went into this production. Most of the time Clooney and Pitt converse in such cryptic speak to keep everyone in the dark. In retrospect its clear that dialogue was just being made up on the spot just so they’d have something to show in the dailies.
The explosives expert doesn’t get to blow anything up, our lead hero and villain never have a scene together, there's not a true comuppance for anyone and Bernie Mac spends half the movie sitting in a jail cell. The allure of the locations has either been left on the cutting room floor or utterly forgotten. (Remember the simplistic beauty of the gang leaving the Bellagio fountain in Vegas to DeBussy’s Clair de Lune?) The Zeta-Pitt relationship takes up a far larger chunk of our time than it actually should and beyond a lack of any chemistry whatsoever, not a single ounce of their exchanges come close to replicating the banter between Clooney and Roberts in Eleven’s restaurant scene. Only Matt Damon seems to care, as he begs for “more of a central role” and tries to take charge when things are going in the crapper.There are some good laughs filtered in-and-out of the days the cast decided to show up on set. (It wouldn’t surprise me if Clooney has less than 40 minutes of clocked screen time.) One quite funny sequence of events cleverly manages to work in Julia’s pregnancy and another big-name cameo to the cast list and is the one moments of pure ingenuity on the part of the group. I can’t find a way to even begin crediting screenwriter George Nolfi, whose sole credit prior to Twelve is as the adapter of the God-awful Timeline. A hundred percent of the gags are goofs, riffs and homages to the actors involved from Zeta’s flexibility in Entrapment to celebrity status to movies they’ve done (Topher Grace reappears having "phoned in that Dennis Quaid movie." It's called In Good Company, opens in a few weeks and is one of the year's best films.) Instead of delivering an even modestly clever riff on the heist genre or worthy follow-up, they are be-boppin’ and scattin’ all over themselves and the audience. It should be with great insult that the final scene is essentially their wrap party, rubbing our noses in what a great time they had making this movie. Well, like good little animals who are taught to learn from our mistakes when our noses are rubbed in shit, we’ll know not to go back for the quintessentially telling Ocean’s Thirteen.
link directly to this review at https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=11326&reviewer=198
originally posted: 12/10/04 16:22:42
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USA
10-Dec-2004 (PG-13)
DVD: 12-Apr-2005
UK
N/A
Australia
09-Dec-2004
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