Ocean’s Twelve (2004)

Ocean’s Twelve: 2004, dir. Steven Soderbergh. Seen at Galaxy Highland (Jan. 1).
If I hadn’t seen the SpongeBob movie recently, I might well say that Ocean’s Twelve is the silliest movie I’ve seen in a very long time. So that’s my verdict: this movie is not as silly as an animated singing sponge. But it’s pretty close.
I liked Ocean’s Eleven (the 2001 one, not the 1960 one) quite a lot. I thought it was a very smart movie with a good cast. I was particularly fond of George Clooney, although I liked just about everyone except Julia Roberts, and at least she didn’t annoy me. I own the DVD of Ocean’s Eleven, because I like watching a clever caper movie, and you know it just about broke my heart when I found out that the Bellagio doesn’t really look anything like it did in the movie.
Ocean’s Twelve is fun, and it’s entertaining, and we had a good time watching it. But it is more like the original Rat Pack Ocean’s 11 than it is like the remake. It’s a bunch of guys (and a couple of chicks) all having a whole lot of fun making a movie together, without much worry about details like the storyline. The dialogue is often quite good, the acting is fine, the direction is stylish and fun. But the story is a mess.

Hardly anyone has mentioned details of the plot of Ocean’s Twelve because first of all, it doesn’t much matter, and second of all, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Andy Garcia’s character goes after the original gang and demands his money back, with interest, in two weeks or else he’ll kill them all. And instead of running away and hiding and changing their identities all up, or running some kind of con directly on him, they take him seriously. That didn’t work for me.
Then they all haul ass to Amsterdam on some flimsy pretext involving an ex-girlfriend (Catherine Zeta-Jones) of Rusty (Brad Pitt with his head shaved), and then over to Rome, and you get the impression this is really just because the actors all wanted to hang out in Italy for awhile.
The storyline in this movie does not evolve organically, as they used to say when I was in film school. Things do not happen because they makes sense within the universe of the film. One suspects that things happen because someone said, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool to have such-and-such happen?” or “How about if we bring So-and-so in to do this?” In particular, the way in which Julia Roberts’ character is drawn into the museum heist is so amazingly goofy and ridiculous that if it hadn’t been done by top-notch actors and a first-rate director, it would have been a top-notch bomb. I cringe to think about it, but it was funny at the time, in part because I could not believe the filmmakers actually had the audacity to do it.
There are still elements of the plot that I don’t understand at all, such as why they put Yen in the bag on the bus in the first place. Some other plot points do have reasons behind them, but they are awfully flimsy. The point seems to have been to pull a con on the audience as well as some of the characters, but it’s too complicated and flimsy and doesn’t make a lot of sense. The ending seemed somewhat flat, too.
The relationship storyline in this movie centers around Brad Pitt and Catherine Zeta-Jones’ characters, so they get the bulk of screen time, instead of George Clooney and Julia Roberts. Zeta-Jones’ character reminded me a whole lot of Faye Dunaway in The Thomas Crown Affair, but it still worked for me. Matt Damon also has a larger role in this film than he did in Ocean’s Eleven.
The great disappointment to me was how many of the actors seemed underused, especially George Clooney. I mean, the title is Ocean’s Twelve, right? He should be the ringleader. But that isn’t evident as it was in the first movie. His first scene in this movie was right out of Out of Sight, and in fact his role reminded me more of the one he played in that movie than Danny Ocean from the previous movie. He didn’t have nearly enough to do.
Clooney and Zeta-Jones were more fun in Intolerable Cruelty, anyway. And Don Cheadle and Bernie Mac were practically superfluous.
However, some of the other minor characters were quite enjoyable, such as those played by Eddie Izzard, Robbie Coltrane, and (I didn’t figure out who this was until I checked just now, and damn) Albert Finney.
In short, Ocean’s Twelve was a fun (and silly) matinee diversion, but a lousy caper film.