Oceanic Letdown

Rating: Null/10 (23 December 2004)

If you haven't seen the previous installment ( Ocean's 11 ), this sequel is actually decent entertainment. For those of us who enjoyed the brilliantly conceived casino heist in Ocean's 11, and who were hoping for an encore, Ocean's 12 is a disappointment, like most recent sequels. This franchise main theme, as enunciated in the first installment, is spectacularly clever heists by a crew of world class robbers. Moviegoers expect sequels to live up to the established theme. Ocean's 12 fails to abide by this principle. There is no substantive heist in Ocean's 12 to speak of. Robbery scenes, if any at all, are rushed, and hardly completed by even more rushed retrospective/flashback sequences. The folks who produced this flick just couldn't muster the patience requisite to achieve a comprehensive heist scene which made Ocean's 11 so compeling. The Break dancing inspired Yoga job, against a security laser barrier, by the French master robber, is so not believable as to be galactically pathetic. You actually feel robbed after watching that sub-moronic scene. This is an hackneyed sequel, probably rushed to the screen to ensure that the all star cast here is retained to capitalize on the success of Ocean's 11, and what we get is pure cinematic platitude. If you'd like to moderately enjoy this film, you must forget about the previous installment.