Let’s get one thing straight to start off this review: I was a big fan of Ocean’s Eleven. With the child-like innocence, I placed my trust in Ocean’s Twelve to follow the formula that made its predecessor so great. I hoped for a simple story, with enough plot twists to keep it from being too predictable; I hoped for a vaguely feasible plan to steal whatever the target was; I hoped for the unpretentious fun of a good heist movie.
What I got instead included nauseating cinematography, inane Hollywood in-jokes, and an even more inane plot to go with them. The movie is entirely based on the premise that Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia), the owner of the Bellagio from the first movie, has somehow found out who all the members of Ocean’s Eleven are, where they are, and somehow has enough evidence that they’ve stolen his money he can feel free to blackmail them into paying it back.
At this point, my brain started to rebel against the movie. They didn’t get away with it? WHAT?! So, not only do director Soderbergh and his crew feel it necessary to ruin my expectations for Ocean’s Twelve, they had to go and ruin one of the most pivotal points of Ocean’s Eleven— that the Eleven are smart enough to avoid being caught!
That’s only the start of the horrors in store for the viewer. Yet to come include appearances by a competing thief (Vincent Cassel) who manages to yoga-breakdance his way through a room of sweeping lasers, and Danny Ocean (George Clooney) systematically asking, “Do I look fifty to you?” to just about every character in the film.
Now, don’t get me wrong. The movie is fun and light-hearted, and looks like it was a lot of fun to make—which is the angle the stars all played up when they went on their talk show circuits. But anyone who has sat through a friend’s story of “that fun time when...” can tell you that it’s just not as fun if you weren’t there. For instance, I’m sure everyone on set thought it was funny when Clooney wandered around asking everyone how old he looks. It just isn’t something that translates well to an audience that’s not comprised of his close personal friends.
Imagine you and your friends get together to make a movie. Now imagine that you have an enormous budget, and a publicity engine the size of Montana. You’d probably experiment with all sorts of “artsy” camera angles, and even go for that shaky indie-film look with handheld cameras. You’d probably want to hang out in Europe, so why not film it there? And you’d definitely include plenty of time for your friends to ad-lib. After all, who has a good time just reading lines from a script? And while you’re at it, who needs a script anyway? That ruins the free-form path your movie should take.
It almost seems like that’s what happened with Ocean’s Twelve. It’s a movie with bad camera work, bad jokes, a bad plot, and character degradement instead of development. The movie manages to take the characters who each earned a special space in my heart in Ocean’s Eleven, and show them to be shallow, unintelligent, and short-sighted. In my opinion, Ocean’s Twelve not only has absolutely no merit on its own, but actually manages to detract from my love of Ocean’s Eleven. Why, Soderbergh, why?!
