Ocean's Twelve

I loved Ocean's Eleven. It was interesting, humorous, and fun to watch. It was well-written, well-filmed, well-acted, and well-edited.

Let me warn you. This review contains spoilers. But let me warn you further: you absolutely do not want to see this movie. Trust me on this. It's my duty to convince you not to see this movie. Ever. It's not even worth watching for comedy value. And for that reason alone, this movie is worse than Battlefield Earth.


Benedict now has creepy
half-tinted sunglasses, a cigar,
and a cane in every scene.
Yes. I'm not exaggerating. Ocean's Twelve is worse than Battlefield Earth. Anyone who has seen Battlefield Earth is probably laughing right now, thinking, "There's no way that anything could be worse than Battlefield Earth. It truly is the worst movie ever made." Let me tell you about Ocean's Twelve.

The movie is about 125 minutes long. Of those, about 110 minutes are spent in montages. It's simply a huge sequence of montages with occasional dialogue inserted for variety. But the montages aren't interesting - they don't advance the "plot", they don't develop characters, and they don't inform us of anything. They just waste time or show off strange camera angles. Most of them simply consist of each of the 12 characters taking a very long time to look at each other.

The movie starts with a montage of Benedict magically showing up in front of the 12 original heist members, one by one, to their surprise. Immediately afterward, there's a big meeting in which the 12 agree to pay Benedict back all of the money they stole in the first movie. Nobody fights it or questions it, and they all have a big meeting where they decide that they need to go steal some things in Amsterdam to make enough money to pay Benedict.

They all fly to Amsterdam and try to steal something. But we don't actually see the theft when it happens. We see a brief summary showing what "really" happened later, a technique employed by the first movie... once. In Twelve, they used this about 8 times. Nothing you see makes any sense at all until a while later, when they give a 10-second overview of what really happened. This time, it's not interesting, it's just frustrating and doesn't make sense.

They first tried to steal a stock certificate, but were beaten by a French guy, who becomes their new enemy. His motivation is that at a party, a master thief didn't say that he was the best thief in the world when the first movie's heist was introduced in a conversation. The French guy wants Ocean to say, "You're better than us." The remainder of the movie is based on this, and Benedict's magical detective skills are forgotten (until they're explained in a 10-second clip at the end, like everything else, long after you've stopped caring about it).

The movie really becomes ridiculous after this.


Julia Roberts as Tess, who impersonates Julia
Roberts as she hangs out with Bruce Willis, also
playing himself.
The French guy says he'll magically pay everything if they can steal an expensive art egg. But they all magically get arrested as they're standing in line, waiting for the museum. So Tess (Julia Roberts) is recruited to help them out, since "she kinda looks like Julia Roberts." So Tess (Julia Roberts) has to impersonate Julia Roberts and get a private showing of the egg at the museum. Bruce Willis shows up out of nowhere and recognizes his friend Julia, who isn't really Julia, played by Julia. Then Catherine Zeta-Jones (who I think might be playing a character) shows up and arrests them. But it doesn't matter - Matt Damon's mom shows up and magically gets all of them out of prison.


The expressive dance through the
museum's security lasers.
Ocean goes to see the French guy because, apparently, the French guy was able to steal the egg. Of course, we didn't see it, because we never actually see anything being stolen in this movie about things being stolen. Instead, we're treated to the most ridiculous scene in the entire movie: the French guy's excruciating musical dance through the museum's magical randomly-moving blue laser array. I have absolutely no idea what they were thinking with this. Maybe they were trying to draw a parallel to Catherine Zeta-Jones' similar act in Entrapment, but this time they had an ugly French guy doing it. This was the only time I laughed during the whole movie.

NEW! 3-minute version of Ocean's Twelve. (Yes, it contains the laser dance.)
Divx AVI, 25 MB

(right-click, Save As...)

Then, in a "fun" plot twist, we find out that the French guy actually stole a replica placed there by Ocean's team, and they had actually stolen the real egg by switching backpacks with someone on a train a week earlier. So the entire second half of the movie was completely unnecessary.

The end.

Rated 0/5

Characters

Every character became a more extreme and annoying version of themselves. Matt Damon's and Brad Pitt's were the worst. Therefore, the director had the good sense to give Matt Damon a lot of long dialogue, and we had to sit through plenty of shots of Brad Pitt staring at something for a while.

Rated 0/5

Cinematography

Montage, then montage, then funny camera angle, then montage, then characters staring at each other, then montage, then the laser dance, then montage. That's the whole movie. They could have dropped 90% of the footage. It would still suck, but at least it wouldn't take 2 hours. By the way, Dell sponsored this movie, because their products are frequently filmed for no reason.

Rated 0/5

Plot

Plot?

Rated 0/5

Overall

This is the worst movie I have ever seen.