Not So Much a Movie, More an Excuse for a Holiday

Rating: 4/10 (26 July 2011)

There are certain types of film which do not seem to lend themselves to sequels. Romantic comedies are one such genre, and heist movies another. No sequel, for example, was ever made to the original 1960 "Ocean's Eleven". The cliffhanging ending to the original "Italian Job" seemed to be paving the way for a second film, but in the event it was never made because the first, despite immense success in Britain, under-performed at the American box office. Modern caper movies, which generally end with the crooks getting away with a huge stack of loot, do not generate many sequels, the logic presumably being that, having made a fortune from one dishonest scheme, the perpetrators are now so immensely wealthy that they do not need to take the risk of pulling off a second.
The 2001 remake of "Ocean's Eleven", however, was an exception. That film ended with Danny Ocean and his accomplices waltzing off with $160 million stolen from three Las Vegas casinos. The sequel opens with Terry Benedict, the owner of the casinos, discovering who was responsible for the theft. Benedict is not content to let the matter rest there, even though he has been compensated by his insurers for his losses, and contacts the eleven members of Ocean's gang, demanding they return the stolen money with interest, of face the consequences. As Benedict is a vicious gangster, those consequences are likely to be serious, but unfortunately the gang discover they do not have enough ready cash to meet his demands.
The rest of the film tells the story of how the gang (now increased from eleven to twelve by the addition of Ocean's wife Tess as an extra member) revert to their criminal ways in order to raise the money. I won't set out the storyline in any further detail, as it is not only complicated to the point of incomprehensibility but also extremely silly. I will, however, say that much of the plot involves the rivalry between Ocean and a French master-criminal named "The Night Fox", both determined to prove himself the world's greatest thief. As in "The Italian Job", robbery is seen as a competitive international sport, this time USA v France rather than Britain v Italy. This was one of a number of American films from the mid-2000s to feature a French villain; is it any coincidence that this was the period when, following their refusal to participate in the Iraq war, the French were being lampooned in the US as "cheese-eating surrender monkeys"? (If only Blair had been as much of a surrender monkey as Chirac!).
Unlike her husband and his associates, Tess does not have any advanced lawbreaking talents; her part in his schemes is to impersonate Julia Roberts, to whom she bears a remarkable resemblance- which is not surprising, as Roberts is, of course, the actress playing her. This is playing games with the normal convention that films take place in a parallel universe in which actors playing roles in the film, unless they appear as "themselves" as Bruce Willis does in a cameo here, do not exist. (For example, it would seem odd if Erin Brockovitch was constantly being told "Miss Brockovitch, has anyone ever told you how much you look like Julia Roberts?") Other films which play the same game include "The Front Page", in which Cary Grant refers to his co-star Ralph Bellamy, and "How to Marry a Millionaire" in which the character played by Lauren Bacall refers to Bacall's real-life marriage to Humphrey Bogart.
Like its predecessor, the film features an inordinately large cast of big names. Indeed, the cast is even larger than in the first film, with the likes of Brad, George, Matt and Julia being joined by newcomers Vincent Cassel (as the Night Fox) and Catherine Zeta Jones as a glamorous detective on the trail of Ocean's gang. (As in "Entrapment", the luscious Catherine plays a criminal investigator who decides that participating in crimes is more fun than investigating them).
There are, in fact, so many major stars here that some of them become almost invisible, either because their parts are minor ones or because they put so little effort into them. George Clooney frequently adopts a laid-back, nonchalant style of acting- his left-wing political projects like "Good Night and Good Luck" are something of an exception- but here he is so laid back that he passes through the horizontal stage and ends up with his feet higher than his head. To make matters worse, most of his co-stars also seem to be graduates of the Clooney Cool School of Acting. Everyone looks as though they are enjoying themselves- as well they might, given that the film was shot in a series of agreeable European locations including Amsterdam, Lake Como, Rome and Paris. Nobody, however, looks as if they are doing any serious acting. "Oceans Eleven" had its faults, but at least it was a superior sort of popcorn movie. "Ocean's Twelve", by contrast, is not so much a movie as an excuse for a large group of Hollywood A-listers to take an enjoyable European holiday. 4/10