Granted you have some serious star power to look at in Ocean’s Twelve and that is the major draw, of course. Put Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Don Cheadle, Andy Garcia, Matt Damon, Bernie Mack, and some surprise cameos in any movie and watch the fireworks go off. Right? Ocean’s Twelve suffers greatly from what I would like to call the Batman-complex. Too many stars; making it nearly impossible to effectively share the screen time in any sort of engaging way for the audience. Watch any interview with the cast and it is obvious they all loved making this movie. Too bad I didn’t have nearly as much fun watching it: Clooney for three minutes, then Damon, then Roberts, then Pitt, etc etc. Character development is necessary in a movie but when you have a dozen people you want to try and develop individually, it’s pretty tough in anything less than a TV miniseries.

The first movie was a rare success in taking a heaping pile of talent and molding it into something that worked brilliantly. Ocean’s Twelve is a disappointment. It’s more of a highlight reel of pretty people than a cohesive movie. I don’t even want to get started on the unnecessarily confusing plot twists that comprised way too much of the final third of the movie. Many of which were really, really stupid. The only memorable thing about the movie are its stars, not the story, not the cameos, not the twists. The stars and Soderbergh’s cinematography. If this movie starred a group of B-list actors it would have been pretty terrible. As it stands, it starts off promisingly enough and gradually turns dull, followed by excessive, then silly.

I saw this film at Cinemark’s Tinseltown 17 Theatres on Peach Street in Erie, PA.

(04-1215)