Ocean's Twelve

Scott Hardie: “It ruled.”

Say what you will about it, this film at least delivers in spades what it promises. It's a banquet of celebrity appearances, heist intrigue, smooth laughs, beautiful locales, and a near-overdose of that same casual sense of cool that carried the first film. These actors know how to be charming, and they make it look easy, but you can sense the experimentation and improvisation going on at every moment; I doubt that any one scene was delivered perfectly in the first take. (Well, maybe the exploding car.)

It's hard not to be entertained by a movie this aggressively eager to please, and I will complain only about the dreary lull when the characters face their biggest setback and the celebrity-as-himself cameo that goes on far longer than it should. Every cast member makes the most of his or her three minutes of screen time, with Catherine Zeta-Jones and Brad Pitt garnering the most sympathy as the characters with the most to lose; Vincent Cassel and/or his body double also make a memorable impression with the museum heist. The trailer gives away some of the best jokes but there are plenty more, some of them easy to miss ("don't go all Frankie Muniz on me") but many of them perfectly executed, like the lost-in-translation exchange with Robbie Coltrane. If there's anything at all that you like about movies, this film's kitchen-sink approach means that it's sure to have it.

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