Review: Oceans Twelve Nukes The Fridge, Fizzles Out, Then Gets Cliché
- Jun 3, 2018
- 3 min read
After reviewing Ocean's Eleven and talking about how I don't really enjoy the first act, I was looking forward to see how Ocean's Twelve would improve on this by potentially offering an exciting first two acts. And it did! And then it failed to deliver for the vital third act.
Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia) is back, and he wants his money, plus interest. He confronts his ex-wife Tess (Julia Roberts) at the house she shares with husband Danny Ocean (George Clooney) and then it's revealed that he's tracked down every member of "Ocean's eleven". The gang reunites and plan to pay back Benedict by committing smaller thefts in Europe. But another thief has beat them to the punch, and he wants to play a game with Danny and his team.
As mentioned above, Ocean's Eleven didn't interest me at all until the final act, so I was hoping for a better setup for Twelve. And I got one. The first act didn't waste time setting the stakes in place, and showing what made it interesting, before the second act made it far more interesting with the introduction of rival thief "Night Fox". On top of this, most scenes were either really interesting and worth paying attention to, or very funny (since this movie is billed as a "comedy"). But then it completely dropped the ball for the third act I was so highly anticipating. Spoilers ahead.
The film decides to break the norm by having the team actually fail the first time around, leaving most of them in jail. But then they really leave the norm behind, by recruiting Tess for Plan B to act as... herself, Julia Roberts. It might not have matched the tone of the films so far, but I was amused, so I played along. But that fails as well, and everyone ends up in jail. Just when you think the film might have an interesting ending, they're all bailed out by Linus' (Matt Damon) mother, who just so happens to be on the force. And that's the end of the actual narrative.
Danny visits the Night Fox, who gloats about winning the competition (in one of the stupidest scenes in the franchise, as he dances among laser beams). But Danny reveals that he and his team had stolen the objective ahead of time while in transit, which is an extremely lazy twist after the cunning of the first.
The three final twists - Linus' mother, the Night Fox won, Danny won - reek of laziness, cliché, and pointlessness. There's no reason they couldn't have taken it a different direction, and not had to rely on, effectively, some random bailing them out. To top it all off, they reveal that the master thief the cop / bland love interest has been chasing for years was her father. It's a good thing that's basically the last scene, because I imagine many viewers just gave up at that point.
I had really high hopes for Ocean's Twelve after the trailer promised a far more interesting first half than Ocean's Eleven. Fortunately, I got exactly what I wished for. Unfortunately, the writers gave up in the last twenty minutes, and destroyed everything the film had set up prior to that point, in spectacular fashion.
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