Ocean’s Twelve Release Date: December 10, 2004 Starring: Bernie Mac, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Eddie Izzard, Matt Damon, Vincent Cassel, Andy Garcia, Brad Pitt, Elliott Gould, Don Cheadle, Julia Roberts, Casey Affleck Directed by: George Clooney, Stephen Soderbergh
PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 12/08/04)
About as thoroughly frivolous an entertainment as has ever been put on the screen, Steven Soderbergh’s sequel to his audaciously amusing 2000 Rat Pack rethink takes such a cavalier perspective on the caper flick that it practically negates the genre. This is sure to outrage some viewers, as will the spectacle of oodles of dazzlingly pretty people indulging in (if one bothers to think about it) immoral hijinks in some of the world’s most dazzlingly pretty settings. Those who adopt a more relaxed attitude will have a better time.
One shouldn’t relax too much, though, because much of the pleasure of this wily cinematic exercise is watching Soderbergh and his crew bury the complex plot line’s points under what appear to be a willfully perverse series of in-jokes and such. (Hitchcockians take note: In a sense, this whole movie is its own MacGuffin.) Having been found out by the casino owner they ripped off, and shamed, in the first film, Clooney’s Danny Ocean and his crew are compelled to get back in business so as to return the nasty man’s money, with interest, or cease to exist. The game is then on, but it’s not the game we think it’s going to be, particularly when a former love of Pitt’s character, a high-powered law officer (Zeta-Jones), and an unctuous French master thief (Vincent Cassel, sporting a ridiculous coif that would have given even Danny Kaye pause) enter the picture. And just as you’re wondering, "What happened to Julia Roberts?" she comes back, with the real punch line to a joke that’s in the picture’s trailer.
Soderbergh, lensing the pic under the union-enforced pseudonym Peter Andrews (after his dad), provides a cornucopia of fizzy, post–New Wave imagery, fitting for a picture that’s pretty much all about surfaces.
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