FrancisPage

Reel To Reel:
Ocean's Twelve

How It Rates: **1/2
Starring: George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt
Rated: PG-13
Red Flags: Mild Language (some of it creatively bleeped!)

Preconceived Notions: The gang's all back, including directer Steven Soderbergh.
The Bottom Line: Twelve may be the new Eleven, but the numbers don't add up.

Steven Soderbergh proved in Ocean's Eleven that remakes can improve upon their predecessors. He took the original Rat-Pack caper film and infused it with coolness, style, surprises and razor-sharp dialogue. So I wasn't worried about a sequel.

Maybe Soderbergh should've gone back and watched that film before releasing this one, which feels more like a TV-series reunion movie than a slick ensemble con-man flick. Clooney and company are all back (including the woefully underutilized Bernie Mac) and they're still scheming, but their chemistry is overshadowed by scenes way overwritten and a poor structure.

Ocean's Twelve picks up two years after the original, with the casino-job guys split up and working straight jobs. Only casino owner Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia) hasn't forgotten about the millions they took from him, and he pays each member of the gang a little payback call. One wonders what took him so long with Ocean. If you remember the end of Eleven, Benedict's thugs were following Ocean and his girl out of the prison parking lot.

Bottom line, the gang needs the get the money to pay Benedict back. Which means they're back to pulling jobs, and since they're "too hot to work in America," it's off to Europe. That begins a series of twists that makes a labyrinth look like I-70 through Kansas. And yes, there's another woman involved. This time it's the cop girlfriend of Pitt's character. And wouldn't you know it, she's got some of the con-man blood.

Eleven worked because it stayed focused on one job. Here, three are operating at the same time. Fellow critic Roger Ebert has called many a caper film a "jerk-around" movie because the audience gets jerked around through plot twists. Normally, I would say that's part of the genre. But here I agree because the plot seems layered in convolution.

Twelve runs two hours and five minutes, and I'm willing to bet it could've been pared down 20 minutes and been better for it. The prequel had a nice brisk pace, and the interaction between the characters grew naturally out of the plot. Here, we have way too many scenes that don't add anything bogging down the film, such as Ocean talking about whether he looks his age and an epilogue ending that is simply a throwaway. I like watching these people, but not that much.

I liked the first film because it was truly an ensemble picture. Here, Roberts and many members of the cast get short shrift and aren't playing to their characters' strengths. And that's largely because Soderbergh adapted a totally different screenplay by a totally different writer -- George Nolfi -- and tried to stretch it to fit the cast. Rule number one, as Ocean might say, a bad fit dressed up with stars is still a bad fit.