Review: Ocean's Twelve

Rating: Three stars out of four

It was already a caper of the highest order for director Steven Soderbergh to wrangle the complex set of A-and-B-listers who made Ocean's Eleven the fun romp it was. Pulling it off a second time is like nicking the crown jewels twice, but that's what he does.

Meet the gang -- George Clooney (Danny Ocean), Bernie Mac, Brad Pitt, Elliot Gould, Casey Affleck, Scott Caan, Carl Reiner, Don Cheadle, Matt Damon (must. pause. for. breath), Eddie Jemison and Shaobo Qin. And we do meet them all, in a passel of scenes in which casino owner Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia), the mark of the last movie, personally calls on each crook to ask him to make good. This could have been a necessary evil, but Soderbergh makes it snappy and peppy: Gould, surprised by Garcia at a palmist (caught read-handed), looks from his nemesis to his fortune teller and demands: "This? You couldn't see this?"

This pretty much sets the giddy tone for the rest of the film, which never lets logic get in its way. For instance, why do they agree so readily to pay back the money? Because Soderbergh wanted to make a sequel, that's why. Why does Benedict want the money, since he was fully insured? See reason one. And why is he so gentle on the gang, giving them two weeks to pay? That will be explained -- in good time, of course, as in any caper flick. There will be plenty of reversals of fortune and expectation before it's over.

In any case, the boys (and girl; Julia Roberts returns as Ocean's moll, Tess) must now pull a bigger heist to cover the money owed from the first one. They're too "hot" to work in America, they decide, so they travel to Amsterdam and later Rome, their time on trains and station platforms giving them ample opportunities for nutty dialogue, usually at the expense of the very un-Bourne child played by Damon.

New to the pack is Vincent Cassel, a successful French thief with a Napoleonic ego and a Cosmo Kramer 'do, who gives Ocean a target to steal and tells him he'll pay back Benedict "if you accept my challenge and win." It's completely unbelievable dialogue, but fun to listen to. Also joining the cast is Catherine Zeta-Jones, Europol's highest-paid cop -- as she must be, given the cinched leather numbers she's forever showing up in. It's a completely unbelievable police wardrobe, but fun to look at. She and Pitt's character have a history, conveniently told in flashback, and she's obviously conflicted about playing cat to this rat pack, saying things like, "The next time I see you, I'm arresting you."

This is a breezy, undemanding film with a toe-tapping score and playful camerawork: Soderbergh, a.k.a. cinematographer Peter Andrews, even does something new with the hackneyed shot of a jet liner taking off and passing overhead. We miss the clever "a place for every man and every man in his place" motif of the previous film, which saw each character recruited for his unique area of expertise. But the pacing is tight, the dialogue sparkles and there's a tiny, needlessly detailed model of the crime scene that the genre requires.