Release Date: December 10, 2004
Starring: George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Julia Roberts, Vincent Cassel, Andy Garcia
Directed by: Steven Soderbergh
Written by: George Nolfi
Distributed by: Warner Brothers
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (language)
I like Steven Soderbergh because, despite all of the success he has known throughout his career, he is still a filmmaker without ego. With Soderbergh you get Quentin Tarantino’s auteur cool without the excess. Usually, anyway. The exception is Ocean’s Twelve, one of the first missteps in recent memory for the director. It is a film desperate to live up to its well regarded predecessor, 2001’s Ocean’s Eleven, but one that consistently and almost completely fails to do so. You can imagine Soderbergh furiously rubbing his gorgeous, A-list cast and glamorous European settings together like two pieces of flint, hoping for the spark that never comes.
The result is a classic case study of sequelitis, two hours of more of the same for no particular reason other than because it will make a lot of money at the box office. What makes it worse is that with this cast, and under Soderbergh’s direction, this should have been a walk in the park.
Instead, things have been unnecessarily overcomplicated. Ocean’s Twelve actually began life as Honor Among Thieves, a script written by George Nolfi about the rivalry between the greatest thief in America and the greatest thief in Europe. Soderbergh, who wanted to do a European-set sequel to Ocean’s Eleven, liked the angle and began transforming the story, with Nolfi and producer Jerry Weintraub, into Ocean’s Twelve.
The story’s transition from a one-on-one piece -- something Michael Mann would have done, like Thief times two -- into an ensemble bit is less than graceful. It takes place three years after the events in Ocean’s Eleven, as Daniel Ocean (George Clooney) and his crew have gone their separate ways, each with an equal share of the $160 million they stole from Las Vegas casino owner Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia) in the first movie. But Benedict has found them out, and wants his money back, with interest.
Ocean and his crew, which includes Rusty (Brad Pitt), Linus (Matt Damon), and the rest of the screwball thieves from the first film, thus concoct a plan to complete a series of heists in Europe to get the extra cash. Complicating matters are a European detective named Isabel Lahiri (Catherine Zeta-Jones), who has been dating Rusty, and a mysterious French thief known as the Night Fox (Vincent Cassel), who is -- not coincidentally -- after the same lucrative targets as Ocean’s gang.
The Night Fox is a great character, but he is underused, a casualty of the changes made to fit the script into the Ocean’s Eleven story arc. Cassel, the talented French actor who plays him, does a good job with what he is given, and I wanted to see more of him -- especially because most of the characters from the first film, already underdeveloped as they are, wear quite thin in Ocean’s Twelve.
Pitt, Damon, Clooney, and Julia Roberts (once more playing Danny’s wife Tess) -- not to mention the gaggle of character actors who round out the Ocean gang -- are clearly chomping at the bit, eager to do something, but the story leaves them continually short-changed. Zeta-Jones, meanwhile, gets a meatier part of the story as a detective whose talent for catching thieves may come from her father, who was a thief himself but disappeared years ago. The actress turns in a more complex performance than any of the returning cast members but finds her character marginalized when the movie finds itself obligated to focus on Ocean and company.
Danny Ocean and his crew of thieves are not worth the time anymore. Ocean’s Eleven, which was written by Ted Griffin, was a simple tale of revenge -- Danny was out to screw Terry Benedict because Tess had left Danny and was now dating Terry -- wrapped around a straightforward heist; the rivalry between Danny and Terry and the execution of the heist, quarterbacked so wonderfully by Soderbergh, were what made it immensely watchable.
Nolfi’s screenplay for the sequel pushes the characters far beyond the point of usability, and crowds them -- and the great heist scenes -- out with an even bigger cast. Even in his celebrated epic Traffic, which had an extra 20 minutes to play with, Soderbergh had a smaller ensemble than this.
Ocean’s Twelve is a more ambitious movie, but it didn’t have to be, which why it is a failure in the way that Solaris and Full Frontal were not. Soderbergh took chances in those movies, and if he came up short then it was because they were risky films from the start. But Ocean’s Twelve is not the film where a director breaks new ground; Soderbergh, consumed with his own capabilities, has not yet learned the secret to making small films the way, for instance, Steven Spielberg has: Just let the actors do the work.
At a basic level, he does. Damon, Pitt, and Clooney have a funny scene in which they negotiate a deal with a small-time criminal in Amsterdam, talking in convoluted code phrases the whole time. Another good one is the one where Pitt and Clooney sit up late at night in a hotel room in Rome, trying to fall asleep, by drinking wine and watching an Italian-dubbed episode of “Happy Days” on television.
On other levels, though, Soderbergh appears to be preoccupied with putting a high European gloss on the film. He is a talented filmmaker, capable of replicating almost any style like some kind of cinematic stem cell. But amid all the zooms, focuses, tracking shots, and ubiquitous intertitles, he seems to have lost what made Ocean’s Eleven worthwhile: the breezy, uncomplicated fun of watching a bunch of A-list stars goofing off. Sometimes, less really is more.
-- Craig Roush (craigroush@hotmail.com)