Ocean's Twelve movie review & film summary (2004)
With some movies, you begin to notice implausibilities. With others, you begin to admire them. For example, since Benedict eventually pays a personal call on each and every one of the original 11, why don't Danny and Tess simply telephone the other nine and warn them Benedict is coming? The reason you don't want to ask that question is because it would prevent the movie from introducing all the crooks and showing us what they're doing now.
One of the problems with a movie like this is directing traffic: How do you establish 11 characters (not counting Benedict, police inspector Catherine Zeta-Jones, rival thief Vincent Cassel, etc.) and keep them alive? You have a roll call every once in a while is what you do, or you have them thrown in jail so the camera can pan across their faces and remind us who they are. Occasionally you have a scene for no other reason than to get an actor's face on the screen for five seconds, so he will not be misplaced. Elliott Gould puffs on his cigar three different times for this very reason.
The movie takes inventory of its characters with the same droll wit it does everything else. The original original "Ocean's 11," made in 1960 by the Rat Pack, was a send-up of 1950s caper movies (it was inspired by Jean-Pierre Melville's French classic "Bob le Flambeur"). The new original "Ocean's Eleven" (2001) was a successful attempt by Soderbergh to doodle with the formula, much as a pianist might pick out a tune just well enough to show he could play it if he wanted to. Now, with "Ocean's Twelve," Soderbergh and his scenarists, George Clayton Johnson, Jack Golden Russell and George Nolfi, are doing a jazz riff. This isn't a caper movie at all, it's an improvisation on caper themes. If at times it seems like a caper, well, as the fellow said when he got up from the piano, it might not be Beethoven, but it has a lot of the same notes.
What Soderbergh is working with here is the charm of his actors, particularly Clooney, Roberts, Brad Pitt and Jones, who have the key roles, and the puppy-dog earnestness of Matt Damon, who wakes up Pitt on a trans-Atlantic flight to tell him he thinks he's ready to play "a more central role." Damon's character is named Linus, a good choice, since he is too sincere and intense to rise in Ocean's ironic universe. When one character is excoriated as agoraphobic (what a wonderful phrase that is, "excoriated as agoraphobic," don't you think it's almost musical?), Linus earnestly argues, "I don't think we have to be the kind of organization that labels people." There is a scene of mad invention in which Clooney and Pitt take him along for a meeting with Robbie Coltrane, an underworld contact, and their entire conversation is nonsense -- an exchange of elegantly meaningless paradoxes. Linus doesn't understand a word, which is reasonable, but what he doesn't realize is that they don't, either.
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