A terrible reunion.

Rating: 4/10 (23 April 2005)

With Ocean's 11 making a big splash a few years ago with mixed collage of Hollywoods's finest, a sequel like this was inevitable. But, as most sequel go, it looks very good on paper, a high demand but rarely captures the original and this reunion is no different.
In Ocean's Reunion, Benedict finally finds the whereabouts of Ocean and his gang and gives them a two week deadline to come up with the money that was stolen (with interest.) While venturing to Europe to do some heists to pay off the debt, the gang finds out they have been set up by a rival thief in order to find out "who's best." Now it's race between Ocean and his crew and this thief going after the same prize, with the winner accepting the glory. Oh yeah, and if Ocean wins, the thief plans to pay Ocean's debt. No, I'm not making this up.
Ocean's 11 was a great movie because it had great actors with good acting(OK, except Clooney), excellent plot which was simple yet intriguing, very good dialog and most of a all, a satisfying ending. Now, take that and minus everything that was good about it, except the actors and add Catherine Zeta-Jones and you have Ocean's Reunion.
A had some major problems with Ocean's Reunion. Zeta-Jones's (who took a break from her T-Mobile commercials)was added in to play as a European detective tracking various thieves, more importantly she's shacking up with Pitt's character with them both of them playing a cat and mouse game throughout the the entire movie, because that's what the movie needed. Who knows, maybe I should give Sodenberg the benefit of the doubt and his script of "Out of Sight" somehow accidentally got mixed up with this one.
The biggest problem I had with this reunion, besides the whole "Thomas Crown Affair" thing going on, was that Julia Robert's character, Tess, played Julias Roberts. Did you get that? In fact, the credits later on read: "Introducing Tess as Julia Roberts." What? In attempt to steal the prize Tess is brought in as Julia Roberts because Tess and Roberts kind of look alike, that's probably true because they're the same person. Then they topped off this calamity with a cameo of Bruce Willis who plays himself to spoil the gig. I was kind of shocked why Willis didn't recognize Matt Damon who played Linus because they were in the entire scene with him. Weird.
With all sarcasm aside, this was way too drawn out taking forever for the plot to emerge. There were also to many plot twists (which seems to a prerequisite these days) which makes the movie hard to follow. The ending is terrible, comparing nothing like the original. The movie also centered more on Pitt, Jones and the unknown thief when the movie should've been focused on Garcia's anger and revenge, the fact he he lost 167 million dollars and his woman. In fact, Garcia's revenge is limited to only the first 10 minutes of the movie. It also should've contained some comedic scenes while the crew worked together, but that never happened neither. For a movie that spent four years in the making, this was seriously disappointing. The spent more time reliving the success if the first and drawing audiences than actually making a riveting plot. It's worth a rental and that's it.