Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Twelve arrived three years after Ocean’s Eleven, and it carries the weight of that film everywhere it goes. The crew is back. The charm is back. What is missing is the reason any of it needed to happen again. The film runs 125 minutes, and it spends a good stretch of them explaining why eleven men who already got away with $160 million now have to do it all over again.
Trailer, via Warner Bros. Rewind.
Terry Benedict Comes Collecting
The premise is a debt. Andy Garcia’s Terry Benedict tracks down all eleven members of Danny Ocean’s crew and demands they return the $160 million they stole from his casinos, plus $38 million in interest. He gives them a two-week deadline. He threatens to have them arrested or killed if they miss it. The movie never resolves what happens to that threat, because the crew takes the job instead.
That is a clean hook, and it is the last clean thing in the film.
Short by half the amount, the group decides to stage a heist in Amsterdam to avoid trouble with U.S. authorities. Carl Reiner’s Saul declines to participate, saying he is too old for another grand heist. An informant named Matsui tips them off about the location of the first stock certificate ever issued.
The Night Fox and the Fabergé Egg
The certificate is already gone. A master thief called the “Night Fox” took it first.
Europol detective Isabel Lahiri, played by Catherine Zeta-Jones, is called in to investigate. She realizes she gave Rusty Ryan the idea for solving a complication of the heist during their earlier relationship, when she described a similar burglary. She shows up at the crew’s accommodation and warns them they cannot beat the Night Fox or his mentor, the master thief “Gaspar LeMarc.” Both excel in the “long con.” She has been hunting them for years. She also steals Rusty’s phone.
Danny and the crew learn the Night Fox is François Toulour, a wealthy French baron and gentleman thief with a villa on Lake Como. Vincent Cassel plays him. Danny goes to the villa and steals Toulour’s paintings. Then he confronts him, and the film’s real machinery clicks into place.
Toulour exposed their identities to Benedict, breaking the code of silence among thieves. He hired Matsui to feed the crew the stock certificate lead so he could meet Danny face to face. He is outraged that LeMarc suggested Danny might be the better thief. So he issues a challenge: steal the Imperial Coronation Fabergé egg. If Danny and his crew win, Toulour pays off their debt to Benedict.
The crew is forced to pull off heists in Rome, Paris and Amsterdam. The tagline promises that “Twelve is the new eleven.” That is a marketing line, not an argument, and the film never quite makes the case for it.
A Cast That Earns Its Keep
The ensemble is the reason to watch. The list of names is long, and most of them get something to do:
- George Clooney as Danny Ocean, the crew’s leader
- Julia Roberts as his wife, Tess
- Brad Pitt as Rusty Ryan, Danny’s right hand
- Matt Damon as Linus Caldwell
- Catherine Zeta-Jones as the Europol detective Isabel Lahiri
- Andy Garcia as the casino owner Terry Benedict
- Casey Affleck as Virgil Malloy
- Don Cheadle as Basher Tarr
- Bernie Mac as Frank Catton
- Scott Caan as Turk Malloy
- Vincent Cassel as the baron François Toulour
- Eddie Jemison as Livingston Dell
Clooney and Pitt still trade lines like men who have known each other for decades. Zeta-Jones is the best addition, and she is given the only new character with a real stake in the outcome. Cassel’s Toulour is a peacock, and the film knows it, which helps.
Damon’s Linus gets the most screen time of the supporting crew, and the film keeps handing him scenes that require him to be the joke. It works about half the time.
Where the Heist Goes Slack
Soderbergh directed, George Nolfi wrote the script. The first film was a machine. This one is a machine with extra gears bolted on.
The film stacks complications instead of tightening them. The two-week deadline should create pressure. It mostly creates narration. Characters explain the plan to each other, then explain it again when the plan changes.
The Lahiri subplot is the strongest thread, because it gives Rusty something to lose besides money. The film does not lean on it hard enough. Zeta-Jones disappears for stretches, and when she returns, the movie treats her as a complication rather than a person.
The twist that Toulour set the whole thing up is good. It reframes the first act, and it gives Danny a real opponent instead of a deadline. But the film reveals it late, and then has to spend the back half cashing it in.
The Sequel Problem
Ocean’s Twelve grossed $362.9 million worldwide and finished as the tenth-highest-grossing film of 2004. That is a hit by any measure. Warner Bros. released it in the United States on December 10, 2004.
The money does not settle the question of whether the film works. The sequel cashed the check the first film wrote.
It was followed by Ocean’s Thirteen in 2007, with Soderbergh and most of the cast again returning.
What Actually Works
The movie is not a failure. It is a hangout film wearing a heist film’s clothes, and when it remembers that, it is pleasant. The Lake Como sequence has real menace. Toulour’s villa is the one location that feels like it belongs to a thief’s world rather than a travel brochure.
The problem is that the film keeps apologizing for itself. It winks at the audience, it references the first movie. Self-awareness is not a substitute for stakes.
The Lahiri material is the part worth watching. A detective who has spent years chasing two master thieves, who once loved the man she is now hunting, who knows the “long con” better than the crew does — that is a movie. Ocean’s Twelve keeps cutting away from it.
A Middle Film in a Trilogy
Ocean’s Twelve is a sequel that mistakes more for better. More cities, more thieves, more complications, more winks. The cast is too good and too relaxed to be boring, and Soderbergh’s control keeps the thing watchable. But the film never finds a reason for the Fabergé egg to matter the way the first film’s score mattered.
The published critical score is 5.8 out of 10, and that lands about right. It plays like a bridge between a very good first movie and a third that had the sense to go home again. Clooney, Pitt, Zeta-Jones and Cassel are worth the ticket. The script is not.
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