What can one expect?

Rating: 5/10 (4 January 2005)

If you read my review for Ocean's 11 you'll much better understand this review for it's follow up. You can understand why they would all want to make a sequel and hats off to them for bringing back the entire cast including director Stephen Soderbergh, how often is that doable? As expected, or at least as I expected the follow up to a great movie in 2001 falls short in many ways. The 2001 remake was made to bring together some of Hollywood's actors and have a great time. They lost this magic doing the sequel, in fact for most of the film the cast seems downright depressed.
The story picks up three years after the original. Terry Benedict has finally tracked down Danny Ocean and his eleven accomplices who robbed him of 160 million dollars. Now that he's found them he wants every penny back plus interest to the tune of about 198 million dollars or he's going to kill every last one of them. So Danny and Rusty hatch a new scheme (no pun intended.) The twelve of them go to Europe in order to find a big heist to pay back Benedict. They find two of the world's master thieves and get into a competition with the one they call Nightfox. If Ocean and his men can boost a precious egg from high security before Nightfox does, Nightfox will pay their debt to Benedict.
I think Soderbergh attempted to not recreate the first film and simply redo scenes using the same style but by doing that he actually lost what the original movie had. The plot was not nearly as good and much of the film was just very pointless. In the original, everyone and everything had a purpose. Every thing we as the audience saw happen, even if we thought it was an error turned out to be part of a clever and elaborate plan. In Ocean's 12 we don't even see them pull the heist and nothing they do has anything to do with the plot or plan. In the original each character had his own purpose, his own job and in the sequel, none of them had any reason to be there whatsoever. The first robbery they pull in Europe has no bearing or reason behind it. Clooney's character seems bored and rushed. The addition of Hollywood heavyweight Catherine Zeta Jones was a brilliant addition of the ex-girlfriend of Pitt's character who happens to work for Europol as a detective. She's always hot on their trails but that part of the plot is badly underused. The one thing Soderbergh did reuse and try and capture was the blend of on screen/off screen and having Julia Roberts' character Tess Ocean sneak in the museum portraying someone she looked a lot like (Julia Roberts) was a good laugh and very cheeky although rather unbelievable. Cameo's were no less brilliant in this one having the amazing Bruce Willis join in briefly, Albert Finney in a small role, and bringing back Scott Schwartz for his role as Bruiser, however briefly was humorous. The film is not an entire write off but that's mostly because it's fun to see the whole entire cast back, not letting anyone go. The plot and writing is where this film loses out but I'm not sure they could have done it any better for a film that didn't really warrant a sequel. I love sequels and I would see the next 20 Oceans film no matter how bad they were so let's hope they STOP making them here so I don't have to subject myself to that. 5/10