Hollywood’s familiar tendency to
repeat itself, in the form of sequels and remakes, occasionally results in some
entertaining and even artistically successful motion pictures — The Empire Strikes Back, the second
chapter in the Star Wars series, for
example, and that great American document, The
Godfather, Part II. Remakes as different as, say, the second version of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers and
Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear (although
the director claims to dislike them) justify the practice, even suggesting that
duplicating a previous movie matches it with a special moment in history,
attuning it to the whispered music of the Zeitgeist.
The new Steven Soderbergh movie, Ocean’s Twelve, presents a special case,
a rare bird indeed, the sequel to a remake, with perhaps some overtones of
self-plagiarism. His initial remake of the 1960 Ocean’s Eleven in 2001 apparently earned profits large enough to
encourage production of the present film. The new picture reunites the large
and highly popular cast of stars and once again launches them on a big caper,
actually two capers, one in Amsterdam, the other in Rome, complicated by a
couple of related subplots.
Danny Ocean (George Clooney) once
again summons his crew of experts, including Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Don
Cheadle, Elliott Gould, and Bernie Mac, to deal with a most troubling problem
— Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia), whose casino they robbed in the last flick,
has tracked them all down, and threatens them with a slow, painful death unless
they repay the loot, with interest.
The gang naturally concludes to
embark on additional thefts to pay off Garcia — it’s what they do, after all.
When they plan and execute an extremely complicated job in Amsterdam, which
involves underwater work in the canals, they discover that the greatest thief
in Europe, Francois Toulour (Vincent Cassel) has beat them to it, a
circumstance that further thickens the plots.
The movie then revolves around a
series of related endeavors — Ocean’s gang needs to steal the most valuable
Fabergรฉ egg in the world from a museum in Rome, hold off the menace of Garcia
and his thugs, elude an international police squad headed by Catherine
Zeta-Jones, and outwit Toulour, who wagers that he will steal the egg before
Ocean’s gang. In a rapid succession of chess moves, every time the crew
executes some deft maneuver, the police forestall them, so that they must
continually change and improvise, all the while attempting to figure out and
head off Toulour’s plan.
In keeping with the lighthearted
complications of its plots and plans, the movie maintains a high level of
visual energy to match the confusions of the action. As in one of his most
successful previous works, Traffic,
Soderbergh employs a wide array of cinematographic devices to provide an
appropriate equivalent for the scams, switches, and subterfuges of the
characters and their schemes.
He uses flashbacks to illustrate
retrospective narratives, flashbacks within flashbacks, slow motion, fast
motion, razzle dazzle montage, black and white footage to underline past events
in the midst of color, overhead shots, innumerable tricky angles, and even
sideways shooting to prepare the audience for perhaps the cleverest narrative
trick of them all, when Julia Roberts as Danny Ocean’s wife impersonates Julia
Roberts and is almost outed by Bruce Willis, also as himself.
Aside from the rich complexity of
subject and style, and following the example of the original, Ocean’s Twelve sparkles with the energy
and high spirits of its cast. The crew of oddballs and eccentrics, the
contemporary equivalent of the Rat Pack of the first movie, most of them with
strong, even exaggerated screen presences, create a good deal of humor, some of
it derived from the rapid-fire repartee, some of it from the sense that they
are all enjoying the hell out of making the movie. George Clooney’s easy,
relaxed virility plays nicely against Julia Roberts’s tense anxiety, while once
again, Brad Pitt steals most of the scenes he appears in, underacting with a
nicely offhand style.
In placing the action in Europe the
movie in a sense leans toward the tone of the European caper flick, which tends
toward the comic instead of the melodramatic in the American tradition. The
stunning location shooting, especially of Rome and some palatial villas in other
parts of Italy, emphasizes its charm and sophistication: it’s all about the
good life, Italian style, with nobody worried about anything serious in the
commission of a crime.
Like it or not, American or European,
the caper flick places the audience on the side of the criminals, which turns
us all into accomplices and then forces us to enjoy it — and we do.
Ocean’s Twelve (PG-13), starring
George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Andy Garcia, Don
Cheadle, Bernie Mac, Julia Roberts, Casey Affleck, Scott Caan, Vincent Cassel,
Carl Reiner, Elliott Gould, Shaobo Qin, Cherry Jones; written by George Noldi; directed
by Steven Soderbergh. Cinemark Tinseltown, Loews Webster, Pittsford Plaza
Cinema, Regal Culver Ridge, Regal Eastview, Regal Greece Ridge, Regal
Henrietta.
This article appears in Dec 15-21, 2004.
