Smug and cutesy all at once

Rating: Null/10 (21 January 2005)

I wanted to like this film, I really did. The remake of the old Rat Pack vehicle, Oceans Eleven, was nicely done. There was a compact feel to it and some elegant twists and turns of plot that made for an entertaining escapist movie.
In contrast, Oceans Twelve feels bloated, stumbling along with no apparent point in mind. Worse, there's far too much explanation going on. It has been said that if you have to explain a joke, the joke was a dud. Oceans Twelve proves that the same theory holds true for movies. Since the script was perhaps trying to do too many things at once, there was a need to resort to extensive flashbacks to explain what should have been key plot points. Apparently no one wanted to work hard enough to weave those plot points into the script, so they resorted to Gilligan's Island-style flashbacks to reveal key pieces of information that would have made the story much more coherent had those bits of information simply been given to us in the first place.
That would have entailed some deft script-writing and, again, it doesn't seem like anyone other than Catherine Zeta-Jones and Matt Damon wanted to work that hard in this film. George Clooney and Brad Pitt spend most of their time on screen trying to out-smirk each other. I'd smirk a lot too if I was being to do as little as each did in this movie.
The most annoying bit of contrivance was the ever-so-cutey-pie idea of having Tess Ocean, played by Juila Roberts, of course, pretend to be Julia Roberts. I guess that gave them an excuse to let Bruce Willis add a few smirks of his own to the story.
In well-done "con" movies, like The Sting or even the Oceans Eleven remake, the viewer is pulled into the heist and knows enough about the con being pulled to enjoy seeing it unfold. In Oceans Twelve, the heist becomes secondary at best, with the story of the actual heists told in flashbacks. From the flashbacks it looks as if they had the makings of a pretty good sequel, but instead of telling us the story of the heist,we got a weak episode of the old TV show "It Takes a Thief." Perhaps most annoying feature of this movie were the painfully obvious teases for yet another sequel. When that comes out, I'll pass, but I do have a suggestion. Since they spent so much time telling the story of Oceans Twelve in plot-repairing or plot-supplying flashbacks, why not just tell us how they pulled the heist so that I don't have to sit through two hours of fluff to get there.
Mediocre at best.