lazy, half-hearted effort

Rating: 4/10 (15 July 2005)

2004's "Ocean's Twelve" picks up where 2001's "Ocean's Eleven" left off. When we last saw them, Danny Ocean and his hand-picked gang of professional thieves had successfully heisted multi-million dollar fortunes from three Las Vegas casinos, then headed their separate ways to start life anew as upstanding members of their respective communities. However, they've since learned that the past has a way of catching up with a person no matter how much he may try to hide from it, when Tony Benedict, the Bellagio owner, still stewing over the money that was stolen from him three years earlier, shows up on Ocean's doorstep demanding restitution. He gives Ocean and his gang two weeks to come up with the $97 million they owe him or face the consequences. Thus, Danny gathers up the gang once again and heads off to Europe, hoping to lift a few priceless art pieces to stave off certain death (though it's never made entirely clear just how Benedict is proposing to carry out this rather grandiose threat). What Danny doesn't count on is that he will be going up against two worthy adversaries - one a detective and the other a rival thief - who will give him more trouble than he ever bargained for.
"Ocean's Twelve" is a disappointment for a whole host of reasons, most of them rooted in the format and structure of the film. For this second outing, writer George Nolfi and returning director Steven Soderbergh have come up with a ha'penny storyline that lacks the intricacy and elegance of the tale in "Ocean's Eleven." Not only does this caper seem haphazardly planned from beginning to end, but the resolution of it falls miserably flat, providing neither the amazement nor the amusement we expect to find in these kinds of stories. Perhaps the idea of stealing a priceless Faberge Egg just doesn't rank up there in either chutzpah or style with knocking over a whole Las Vegas casino, and so the enterprise is more or less doomed to failure from the start. Or perhaps the filmmakers simply failed to find enough for all these characters to do while they're roaming the streets of Amsterdam, Paris and Rome on what appears to be little more than an extended European vacation for some talented but woefully underused actors. Moreover, there is a side foray involving Julia Roberts trying to pass herself off as Julia Roberts that is inane, incredible, preposterous and embarrassing. The sequence is indicative of the lazy, half-hearted approach the filmmakers have taken towards both their material and their audience.
It's also unpleasant watching the one character with even a smidgen of a moral code crossing over to the dark side at the end of the story - and asking us to get all misty-eyed and choked-up when it happens (at least when Anakin does it, we aren't expected to cheer him on from the sidelines).
The high-priced, big-name actors - George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, Andy Garcia, Matt Damon and Albert Finney - go through the motions, but they seem hopelessly cut adrift by the meandering, substandard screenplay. Actually, only Catherine Zeta-Jones, as the detective and former girlfriend of Brad Pitt, is given anything of genuine substance to work with here. All the rest are just picking up paychecks.
In this type of film, plotting is everything, and the sad truth is that the plotting in "Ocean's Twelve" is pretty damn awful any way you slice it. We've already had it sliced 11 and 12 ways with noticeably diminishing results; do they dare go for unlucky 13?