REVIEWED - OCEAN'S TWELVEStephen Soderbergh re-assembles his rat pack for another casino heist, but seems content to play the same old numbers, writes Donald Clarke
Ocean's Eleven, Steven Soderbergh's 2001 remake of an unloved 1960 Rat Pack comedy, used that director's formidable talents - a terrific eye for glossy detail, a flair for the comedy of sleek mischief - to put together a film as seductively entertaining as it was worthlessly glib.
Given Soderbergh's taste for post-modern cinematic experiments such as the interesting Schizopolis and the boring Full Frontal, we should, perhaps, not be surprised that he has followed up Ocean's Eleven with a picture that strips that film's architecture down to its constituent elements - stars, heists, jump cuts, shirts, funk loops, gadgets - and fannied around with them in ways that are by turns annoyingly self-conscious and deliciously cheeky. Indeed, the film's best sequence, the details of which we won't spoil, extracts comedy from celebrity and plays games with the film's relationship to the real world in a fashion that would not be out of place in one of the director's more highbrow exercises. Thankfully, the episode is also extremely funny.
Soderbergh doesn't seem to have given much thought to the story, but, for the record, it begins with casino owner Andy Garcia delivering an ultimatum to each member of George Clooney's mob of glamorous thieves: they must return the vast sum of money they stole from him in Part One within two weeks or else. Since each of them has already frittered away several millions - and Garcia is demanding interest - the boys are forced to go back into business.
Which clichés of the genre has Soderbergh not mucked around with yet? The glamorous female detective - think The Thomas Crown Affair - who romances a leading tea-leaf as she plans his demise? Eurocop Catherine Zeta-Jones is on hand to chat up Brad Pitt. The rival master-criminal who seeks to beat our anti-heroes to the loot? Vincent Cassel appears as a sleek burglar with an interest in the same Fabergé egg the boys are casing.
The picture is little else but a collection of smart-arse gags and clever-clever games and, as such, gives one pause (yet again) to wonder why Soderbergh, a respected director at the height of his powers, seems so reluctant to originate adventurous new material. That said, a surprising number of the routines work very well indeed. The sequence in which Clooney frets over his age plays delightfully with his perceived vanity and the real Matt Damon acts dumb even more convincingly than his doll did in Team America: World Police. We have endured worse spectacles in the cinema than the sight of Steven Soderbergh treading water.
