OCEAN'S TWELVE
2004
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
Written by George Nolfi
2001's Ocean's Eleven had been the biggest hit of Steven Soderbergh's career, so when what was itself already a remake got a sequel three years later, the widespread assumption was that the indie wunderkind was paying his studio dues on behalf of more artistic pursuits that, eventually, he'd get back to. Probably what happened was that a lot of snobs don't actually understand filmmakers, and at least to hear Soderbergh tell it, Ocean's Twelve—for that is the sequel's name, locking the franchise into a convention that could've gotten ridiculous—was entirely his idea. How this squares with his prior statements that making Eleven was a slog is hard to determine, but I'm content to suppose that he saw the movie he made (and saw that it had made numerous people very happy) and realized that, by virtue of the experience he'd gained on the first film, a second could be much easier and more enjoyable; this seems to have been the case, despite the significant stylistic elaborations and divergences (not to mention the substantial new production challenges) he imposed on himself over the course of making it. That left where to take this Ocean's "saga," though Eleven did end with a sequel hook that Twelve, fairly enough, catches hold of. Fortunately, Soderbergh had a real easy time with this: he just took an unproduced heist flick screenplay called Honor Among Thieves and asked its writer, George Nolfi, to retitle it Ocean's Twelve. This was done, and it says something both complimentary and derogatory about the heist genre that you kind of can just swap completely different characters into a completely unrelated plot, and no one would be the wiser. That's really just normal Hollywood practice, ultimately—and unfair to the significant efforts that obviously still went into the final screenplay, to make it a better Ocean's movie and better heist movie both—but you at least want to call that the opening salvo in Ocean's Twelve's ongoing campaign of meta.
This, accordingly, is the effect of the film: a statement on genre and even the act of watching a movie. But that can imply a grander overarching plan on Soderbergh's part than I think he intended (though, like many good artists, he might be reluctant to guide you through his intent). A lot of what happens in Ocean's Twelve seems to have been a matter of "sounds cool" than even a process as disciplined as what it looks like, and it doesn't look all that disciplined anyway, openly avowing its loosy-goosiness. I'd aver that as a plot machine, it actually has fewer unfillable holes than Eleven did (I also like that it relies less on batshit sci-fi technology); however, as far as how characters behave, it's comfortable making some incredible leaps, so that you kind of have to fanwank your own explanations for most of its last thirty minutes, especially why its most infamous and most meta sequence even occurs at all. Maybe some explanation was in mind—do they need it to entrap, so to speak, this Ocean's film's romantic antagonist? do they actually share the juvenile one-upsmanship of this Ocean's film's criminal antagonist, and it was a prank? or did Soderbergh or Nolfi honestly just get their own who-knows-what-when all confused?—but it's not something that gets spelled out, even with bullshit. It's likeliest that the screenplay simply has two incompatible needs, and instead of finessing it Soderbergh just blasted through it, using so much speed and shock he felt justified in assuming you wouldn't notice or care because you were having too good a time.
Objectively, I guess he overreached: Twelve is the only entry in the modern arm of its franchise to have gotten more-or-less bad reviews, and it did less well financially. (Eleven, for the record, maintains its position as the biggest hit of Soderbergh's career; the Ocean's franchise, while always successful, always suffered old-school sequel decay at the box office, perhaps befitting its 20th century, quasi-throwback roots.) Soderbergh shrugged, "if you didn't like it when you saw it, you just didn't watch it enough," which is a bit of a double-edged sword if your problem is its plot mechanics, and not just a distaste towards what slightly resembles a cash-in sequel that funded a dozen or so movie stars' European vacation. I believe that it's grown in reputation over the last two decades, however, and folks become more willing to allow it its implausibilities. My own opinion on it—that it's in the running for the best heist film ever, with the single best heist sequence (which isn't even the same sequence as the mind-bending meta part)—isn't all that widely shared. But maybe one day it'll get its fullest due, as 125 uninterrupted minutes** of glorious show-offery.
Well, as far as sequeling goes, and despite it starting as a free-standing screenplay, it's wild how much it's the same movie as Eleven, yet only ever feels like it is when it's prompting the satisfying recognition that what the two films are about, if anything, is just how all these cool cats are just a bunch of incurable romantics at heart. Basically, then, it's Danny Ocean's (George Clooney's) love story with Tess Ocean (Julia Roberts), remixed as Rusty Ryan's (Brad Pitt's) love story with Isabel Lahiri (Catherine Zeta-Jones). He lost her several years ago as the natural outcome of he being a criminal and she being a cop, specifically the Europol cop tasked with catching him, and as I wish to argue that this is better than Eleven, I could start by saying that this unifies the central emotional throughline with what I'd call the Ocean's trilogy's best actor, and, unlike Clooney, Rusty's Ocean's love story affords Pitt the opportunity to retreat as well as to heedlessly pursue (whereas if Zeta-Jones is not as efficient a female lead as Roberts, which she isn't, she also doesn't have the same need for that efficiency, because her position in the plot actually does allow her to be "a female lead"). The blatant similarities of the two films, meanwhile, get muted by simply making Rusty's stakes clear immediately in its prologue, a prologue blessed with the first splendid editing choices of a movie that's entirely splendid editing choices, courtesy Soderbergh and his trilogy-defining collaborator Stephen Mirrione. The one I'm thinking of particularly is the smeary freeze frame of Pitt hanging suspended in the air after he leaps out a window upon realizing that she's only hours away from cracking his case; the editing part would be that we return to Zeta-Jones sleeping alone in their bed in regular time, altogether the perfect way to communicate precisely the state of these romantic memories three years down the line. I'm not going to do a frame-by-frame breakdown for everything here, but be sure, the desire is there.
Rusty is fated to collide with Isabel again, for Twelve pays off on Eleven's suggestion that Terry Benedict (Andy García) was not going to allow Ocean's gang to get away so easily. Having been informed of all their identities, he visits each of them individually and puts the fear of some kind of supernatural force in them, something bolstered by García loosening up a little for his bookending set of cameos, having fun being slimy evil this time, and it's bolstered further by the film's best costumes (plural!), engineered to turn the angry casino magnate into an out-and-out 19th century vampire. He offers a way for them to make amends: give him back his $150 million—plus interest—within fourteen days, or die. Of the whole crew, the only one who still has his share left at all, let alone extra, is Reuben Tishkoff (Elliott Gould), who, the joke is, was already extravagantly rich; as for the rest, we've seen how they've been frittering away their millions on comic, often-idiotic enterprises that, without ever defusing Benedict's threat, largely go to prove how much they needed this new caper thrust upon them. (And if I belabor this montage of mostly long-takes that end with Benedict looming into their lives, it's because it's secretly high up on my list of the most impressive things in a very impressive movie. It's amazing that it can do this with eleven characters—plus Topher Grace!—without it ever starting to get visually or narratively stale. I also belabor it because, thanks to production realities, this is going to be about all we get of some of Ocean's Eleven: Carl Reiner's Saul Bloom makes a third act re-entry, but Frank Catton, with Bernie Mac pledged to another film, gets the initial thirty minutes and then spends most of the movie imprisoned in Cutaway Land, as well as offscreen on the toilet the eleven share in their cramped attic base. Eddie Jemison's Livingston Dell picks up a surprising amount of the ensemble slack; slightly annoyingly, Don Cheadle's Basher Tarr feels sidelined even though he's present throughout, partly because the new heists don't have explosions, and even more because they've tightly reined-in his delightful Limehouse, Mars dialect work.)
Anyway, this sends them to Amsterdam, to do one heist to earn the right to do a bigger heist, and so then to Rome, while onscreen text counts down their remaining days of life. The big complication, however, is that they're being toyed with by the man who sold them out to Benedict, their nemesis, Baron François Toulour (Vincent Cassel), who had universally been acclaimed as the world's greatest working thief, until they stole his title with their Vegas job. Piqued and furious, Toulour has responded by forcing them into a diabolical game, Ocean's whole crew in competition against one single vainglorious man to see who can first successfully rob a museum of a Fabergé egg worth some amount of money that doesn't matter, because Toulour is already wealthy beyond measure. He'll write Benedict a check—if they beat him, which he is certain they will not.
So, sure, "problems." I mean, if we want to be joyless, their best move would probably just be to murder Benedict. But that would not be their style, and I love essentially everything about this, including the hour before Toulour even makes himself known, or the half hour after that, which is still preparatory for the big heist. I love every element: for example, Twelve is the best of the three at "Matt Damon soaks up Soderbergh's abuse and apparent undying disdain," with Linus Caldwell forwarded even further as the protege that Danny and Rusty hold in good-natured contempt, as well as a proper "third lead" of the Ocean's films but only in ways that continue to metacinematically question whether Damon is really in Pitt's or Clooney's league, so that even the film's least-credible twist becomes enjoyable when interpreted in light of the trilogy's bizarre secondary goal of embarrassing Damon. I love, of course, the interstitial bits where the crew just interacts in funny ways, and even if this one isn't equitable about it, it's trying—they've made a soft retcon with Qin Shaobao's Yen so that now everybody understands him when he speaks Chinese, which is an even better joke than when only Rusty did. I love Clooney and Pitt, their shorthand chemistry established in the earlier film allowing them to get the absolute maximum out of a handful of shared scenes.
I am downright awed by the thing—big spoiler, but I already said spoilers—that's still most-discussed as regards Ocean's Twelve, with Ocean's twelfth turning out to be Tess, and her part in the plot turning out to be founded on how much she looks like—have you noticed?—famed actress, Julia Roberts. It's so snotty about it, too!: that she won her Academy Award on Soderbergh's watch and they lord it over Bruce Willis (himself) is snotty; the jokes about fellow twist-deliverer The Sixth Sense are hugely snotty, but they're funny; and the whole thing is so incredibly loopy, Tess drafted into the con to get at the egg by virtue of her own performer, whom she is obliged to impersonate, just sort of exploding the reality of this movie and by extension all movies with it. (And it's still a perfectly solid caper sequence.) I adore Damon and Cheadle critiquing Roberts's performance as Roberts. I adore that first-trimester pregnant Roberts plays a third-trimester pregnant Roberts with a pillow in her dress because the movie was coming out then.** I adore, beyond all reason, the screen credit Tess receives, "and introducing Tess as Julia Roberts," reversing what came off so much like a dumb, corny joke in Eleven's credits that I could wonder if Soderbergh had the idea all along, but he didn't: the original script had the bland idea of Roberts impersonating a Romanov, Anastasia-style, but miraculously this inspiration, and Roberts's pregnancy, struck.
But I love how Soderbergh made his movie, too, at least for the most part: it is, probably, a less beautiful film overall than Eleven, albeit mostly on purpose (I'll admit I don't like Soderbergh's directorial/cinematographic yellow-tilted color grading decisions on a substantial fraction of his interior shots); but while Eleven situated itself in the American 60s as the source of its style, Twelve is somewhat more European and a lot more 70s, with the film taking on a starker cast overall, and its shot design tilting as much towards "paranoid thriller" as "pop art caper." That's the baseline, and then there's all the abnormal style modules that populate much of the film, like the 00s French indie crime movie riff; it's a more varied movie than Eleven could've been. Soderbergh also allows trilogy composer David Holmes a more substantial-feeling voice: I regret not mentioning him previously, but, in Eleven, Holmes's breezily-good score happened because of the thriller sequences; in Twelve, it feels more like those sequences happen because of the music. A small difference, maybe, but one that has a far more visceral impact.
And Twelve demands a more visceral impact: in a conversation years ago, I described it as The Empire Strikes Back of its trilogy, which I already realized at the time sounded stupid, but if it vindicates me, I've recently learned Soderbergh called it the exact same thing; I like to think both of us were kidding on square. It does, anyway, see the crew savaged and separated, and at the mercy of enormous forces they seemingly couldn't possibly beat, for whom crime is such a simple children's game that Cassel (superb throughout) plays dress-up against Zeta-Jones for literally no reason, and, through sheer unsporting cruelty (it's my very favorite joke in the movie), Toulour crank calls Danny to interrupt his sleep the night before his heist. It opens up the franchise to an enormous global mythology of stylish crime, imagining a supervillain who embodies the very concept of stylish crime; its editing rhythms and "feels good, do it" narrative and stylistic kaleidoscope additionally afford it an almost impressionistic cast, a hazy, overstimulated celebration of the whole heist film genre. That mythology also takes the form, inter alia, of the secret grandmaster thief, whose careless insult of his student, Toulour, prompted this entire farce. His identity as a character lends the film a lovely sense of closure (and Pitt's best reaction shot), and its maguffin of an "egg," a nicely semiotic quality. His identity as an actor is the one thing in the movie that definitively fails; considering that so much of it is about playing with movie stardom, and considering how diligent Soderbergh has been to make Albert Finney's reveal a surprise, all it indicates is "Albert Finney sure is one of my repertory players!" than "I have a great idea for whom to play the God of Thieves." Finney was in a heist movie, once. Ever seen Loophole? Of course not. (And it's not even a continental heist movie, for crying out loud.) Get John Phillip Law, or get out.
If that's the worst thing, then it can't be a movie with too much bad in it. It saves its finest turn for last, its most forceful example of music defining the action (even if, calling into question his faculties, using La Caution's "A La Menthe" was over Holmes's objections). Our heroes ultimately defeat their magnetically despicable archenemy, but the film is classy enough to give its single best scene to him anyway, allowing him to "win," at least in our hearts, with the platonic ideal of the Laser Dance, perfecting the ideas first innovated by Grand Slam and Gambit and later semi-iconically pursued by the female lead of this very movie, except Soderbergh corrects any deficiencies one might've perceived in Entrapment: the lasers are, this time, proudly visible. And there's Cassel, who astoundingly does all but one shot of the stunt-heavy two minute scene himself; as he slinkily capoeiras through the roving pattern to the time of the song beneath the watchful gaze of impassive marble deities, I think it's fair to say that Cassel gets to be sexier than arguably the hottest woman in the world got to be in a movie where she pointed her ass directly at a camera, concluding the scene with a transcendent grace note to confirm that what we've witnessed isn't just the best heist scene but the best musical number of the 21st century. That it turns out to be fruitless isn't important to anybody, except to Toulour; it exemplifies Ocean's Twelve's abiding attitude of not mattering, because movies don't matter, unless they can show you this kind of marvelously good time.
Score: 10/10
*Still shorter than 1960's Ocean's 11, how the fuck. Probably because it leaves out thirty minutes of deleted scenes Soderbergh couldn't figure out what to do with, much of which I earnestly wish were still in the movie, notably Linus's Fagin-like attempt to assemble an Ocean's Junior cadre of child criminals.
**The only thing that could make her interactions with Willis more insane is if she hadn't, but this isn't something you ask a pregnant woman to do, nor is it Ocean's-brand comedy.
Reviews in this series:
Ocean's 11 (1960)
Ocean's Eleven (2001)
Ocean's Twelve (2004)
Ocean's Thirteen (2007)
Ocean's Eight (2018)
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