Ocean’s Twelve (DVD Screening)

(Spoilers)

I can’t remember exactly when I watched Ocean’s Eleven but I know it was a good few years ago and I was a big fan. It would have been one of the first movies that I watched growing up that had a more mature feel to it instead of the more childish movies I would have been more used to watching. I own both the sequels to Eleven however I know that I have avoided them for so long just because of all the negative criticisms surrounding Ocean’s Twelve, but I just decided to go for it as my expectations were already so low that I couldn’t really be disappointed.

Ocean’s Twelve is no where near as bad as people make it out to be, it is clearly nothing to the standard of the first effort in this trilogy however it is still a decent effort. Unfortunately Ocean’s Twelve takes about an hour for it to really get started which is a shame because when things do start to happen they actually do become quite interesting.  What was so good about the original was the strength of the heist itself, I remember marveling at how clever it was and how well it was presented in the movie, this isn’t the case for Twelve. In this outing the heist really didn’t seem like the focus and there is hardly anytime devoted to the actual heist in this movie.  If I am honest Twelve just doesn’t have as strong a storyline as the first, it is more naff and at times just a little unimaginative.  The fact that the whole motive behind this heist is in order to pay all the money back to the guy they stole it from in the first film was just a bit rubbish, it almost takes away from how badass the first one was. I wanted to see Ocean’s gang swindle Benedict again at the end and get away with the money, it was a shame this didn’t happen however I still have Thirteen to watch – so hopefully they can get one over on him in that outing.

With the return of the entire cast of the first film, this is naturally going to be a strength and the performances across the board were good. Several good comedy scenes do come out of this movie, the standout sequence from the entire movie actually! Julia Roberts impersonating Julia Roberts, at first I thought it was really stupid but the scenes that followed were actually the best in the movie, also the addition of Bruce Willis into all of this mayhem was just fantastic and I a big fan of Willis naturally I loved it! Despite these good scenes I still couldn’t help but think that this sequel just seemed a little scattered at points and it didn’t really have any structure which was frustrating, also that whole thing with the ‘Night Fox’ was all a bit silly and the scene where he bypasses the lasers discredited the movie quite a bit for me.  All in all I can see why people had complaints about this film, it certainly did nothing to help the Oceans franchise but it simply becomes unmemorable rather than damaging to the first film.  Things are going to have to take a step up for Thirteen to patch things up here.

BIGGEST FLAW – Poor plot

BIGGEST ACHIEVEMENT – The whole Julia Roberts/Bruce Willis sequence

Rating – 6/10