Just not good enough

Rating: 4/10 (9 February 2005)

SPOILERS WITHIN One would have thought that the sequel to a hugely popular and very entertaining heist movie would be, well, another heist movie, with an elaborate scheme that at least attempts to rival the first movie for ingenuity and intrigue. But, unfortunately, they just decided to take a bag of unwanted script pages from other movies, shuffle them, and adjust it to suit the Ocean's Eleven characters. Quite simply, this is the least relevant sequel I have seen for a very long time - even American Pie 3, the Wedding was more warranted than this trite.
In a seemingly extremely unlikely twist of events, Mr Benedict is back and wanting all his money back. So, all the eleven come back together and try to figure out what heist they should do. Sol decides to leave instead. They go to Holland, and find that their heist is done by another master-thief on the same night - the Night Fox is his name. Seems he's got a bit of an ego about Ocean pulling off a better heist at the casinos than he's ever done, and he challenges Ocean's team to what is essentially a heist-off - both teams will try to steal the French Coronation Egg.
This is where the movie gets even worse. Practically everyone gets arrested, leaving only a handful. They call on Tess to help in their heist, and perhaps in a desperate attempt to force me to leave in disgust, they have her disguised as Julia Roberts. But, she and everyone else gets arrested too. So, with Ocean's Twelve all in a European prison, how are they going to escape? Easy! Linus' Mum disguises herself as a European prison officer. The Night Fox shows off the Coronation Egg which he managed to steal from within a room of randomly moving lasers - which we saw in a minute-and-a-half display of impossibly fortunate gymnastics - to Ocean, who then reveals that he stole a replica, and that he stole the real one. What was the elaborate heist scheme used to capture the priceless artefact? A two-minute switcheroo of bags on a train. Getting the picture? Throw in an illogical, predictable, and largely unrelated story arc with Zeta Jones' character, and it's done.
There were positives. Zeta Jones' performance was, as usual, pretty damn good, with a character who was enchanting, despite the complete lack of impact she had on the story. The original, shorter heist, where the Night Fox got there first, also recaptured some of the good work from the first movie. But I can't fathom what they were trying to get out of the rest of the movie - the characters' original witty charm was replaced with the occasional unfunny wisecrack. The first movie attracted a large number of fans through its charming characterisation and elaborate story, and since there was essentially none of that in Ocean's Twelve, it was simply baffling that this film was even made - from an artistic standpoint. From a marketing standpoint, it was perfect - use the popularity of the first movie to sell the second without having to make any effort at all. It worked on me, didn't it?
4/10