In many ways, Ocean's Twelve is my favorite of the Ocean's movies. That's a minority opinion, I know. Indeed, with the ways in which Ocean's Thirteen resembles Ocean's Eleven much more than it does Ocean's Twelve, you get the feeling that even the director Steven Soderbergh agrees that Eleven was better than Twelve. Or if he didn't, then certainly the studios did.
But there's a certain European style to Twelve that I enjoy. The BMI award winning soundtrack certainly helps, but it goes beyond that. The story takes more time to develop than Eleven's did, which feels right when it's set in Amsterdam, Rome, and Paris rather than Las Vegas. It also takes the time to develop Rusty and Isabel's relationship in a way that was merely implied for Danny and Tess in the previous film.
What's more, Ocean's Twelve has a tension that's not present in either of the other movies. That's because Danny Ocean and his crew spend Ocean's Twelve on the defensive. You see, in a standard heist film, the protagonists are on the attack. They're seeing a target, planning their assault on it, then executing said attack. In this one, while there are multiple heists, the fact of the matter is, they're all (with one exception) failures. The team is being pressured by Benedict's desire for his money, and under attack by the Night Fox's counter-operations. That adds a level of difficulty that makes everything more dangerous. Especially since, right up until the very end, things seem to be going catastrophically wrong.
Those elements change Ocean's Twelve enough to make it a very different film than Ocean's Eleven. And that's a good thing. How many times over the years have you been disappointed by a sequel that was just a carbon copy of the original? Men in Black 2, anyone? The very best sequels move the story forward = and change things up. Ocean's Twelve does that.
That isn't to say the film is perfect. People who complain that the ending is a cheat are correct. It is. But it's a clever cheat whose reveal I really enjoyed. Particularly the bit with Linus and his mom. I loved that when I saw it in the theater five years ago and I loved it in on DVD last weekend. It was just so well done that I forgave them the cheat.
Some of the other things are a little more problematic, though. The way that characters are jailed a few at a time means that some of them, particularly Bernie Mac who had TV scheduling problems that kept him out of most of the film, end up doing almost nothing. Also the whole "Tess looks like Julia Roberts" thing was just silly. Obviously, Tess Ocean who is played by Julia Roberts, looks like Julia Roberts. Just like Danny Ocean looks like George Clooney. It breaks the verisimilitude of the film to play on that point, though. Having Roberts play Tess playing Julia Roberts was just odd, and I don't think it worked as well as it looked on paper.
For all that, the movie remains a stylish and amusing tableau to me. I wish more sequels would have the balls to really change things up while still remaining true to their characters the way Ocean's Twelve did.
But was Ocean's Thirteen as good? I'll tell you next week.
No comments:
Post a Comment