Ocean’s Twelve, 2004 – ★★ (contains spoilers)

This review may contain spoilers.

The curse of the sequel. Easy for us to let rip than to come up with a sequel that lives up to an almost perfect successful film, but it is what it is.

The main issue with this is that the goal just isn’t convincing as primal. Revenge for a stolen girlfriend is more of an emotion relatable to a caveman than the dear of death.

Okay, I lie. That would work, but it’s all talk and no action. We’ve not seen Terry Benedict kill off one of theirs or do anything remotely dangerous to convince them (or us) of the threat that leads them to their “bigger” heist.

Then we’re told that the whole death threat thing was just a way for them to do a heist thing so that some other thief who was *offended* to not be known as the greatest thief in the world could get some validation. Uhm, okay, validation is relatable, but that’s coming from the antagonist. Someone we don’t care about, so, we’re back to square one.

Then they all out smug each other, bantering and jiving in a way that we enjoyed in the previous film, and that’s the only reason we get the two stars. They’re a good bunch to watch, and the additional cameos too were welcome, but from this comes my second gripe.

Heist films have a beat where the team comes together. A genre convention that’s part of the expectation. We’re going to need a guy who can do something exceptional. Here we know them all. Despite this, the heist itself is unnecessarily convoluted with jargon. Less show and more tell. It’s cheating. I can’t worry about things going wrong if I don’t know the plan.

All in all, it plays out as they had planned, or so we’re led to believe.

Does it work as a plot? Slimly.
Does it work as a story? Not really.

Despite remembering not liking it, I saw it again just to know why.
And now, I do. As do you.

source https://letterboxd.com/jun6lee/film/oceans-twelve/1/

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