Sky K Studios Movie Blog

Ocean's Twelve

This could be much, much worse. It suffers mainly by comparison to Soderbergh's two equally singular feats of dazzle: Ocean's 11, a gold-standard for caper movies, and Out of Sight, a gold-standard for sex. And possibly caper movies. Certainly for crime thrillers. On any given day, I would rather be watching Out of Sight than writing blogs, let alone reading them. Ocean's 12 prevails in the intersection of sex, line readings, and timing, which is to say, in the use of its stars. It falters in the abuse of same.

It would be lazy to say that it's enough to let Brad Pitt, George Clooney, and the rest of the crew riff off of each other for the better part of two hours. The first movie had that feel, but only in the interstitials; combining those with a thrilling, exquisitely and requisitely twisted heist, the movie combined icing with cake in a bid to top the genre. For 12, Soderbergh reportedly took an old project off the shelf and backed in the large cast. In the first movie he managed the expectations that came with his stable of stars by using a couple of wry asides; the scene where Pitt's Rusty and Clooney's Ocean teach as-themselves Joshua Jackson and Topher Grace to play poker stands out. Mostly, he succeeded by giving Julia, Brad and George the standing of Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart and Katharine Hepburn: their somewhat down-and-out characters were portrayed with the extra heaping of glamour that comes from the discourse of stardom generated by a whole industry apart from the narrative itself.

In Ocean's Twelve, sadly, the problems of squeezing all those extra actors into a different project altogether seems to have reduced his brain to the lame neural firings of Full Frontal, an abysmal filler movie that ranks as the worst of Soderbergh's mostly-disappointing experimental work. In Full Frontal, Soderbergh mistook the ego- and assistant-addled lives of his new friends the stars for thorny issues of representation, of signified and signifier, for the stuff of Pirandello. Inasmuch as the movie ended and could quickly be forgotten, it was forgiveable. But when the feeble antics resurface in Ocean's Twelve, the movie's suspension of disbelief deflates radically. Star power depends on the stars' transfer of their glamour to characters who could, with a little guts, be the audience. To depend on their resemblance to real stars—as a key second-act plot point does with Julia Roberts' character—is worse than deus ex machina (which most heist movies come around to at the end, but who's counting?). It mocks the audience for believing in movies at all.

That's my rant. The fact is, Soderbergh is a master of movie pleasure, and it's worth it just to see Soderbergh's ease with the mise en scene and the actors, Pitt and Clooney's homosocial clowning and the rest of the troupe's dirty-dozen interplay. Any ass can deflate the star system and the glamour of moviegoing. Soderbergh's one of the few directors who has mastered it. Perhaps there's a need for an always-qualifying, ever-undercutting, Dave Eggers-type ironist of Hollywood. Steven Soderbergh shouldn't be that guy.

posted by Josh K-sky at 2:22 PM