Ocean's Twelve: Critic Reviews

Despite a couple of half-hearted, half-baked twists tossed in at the last minute, the story never feels fully fleshed.

What's on screen is lazy, second-rate, phoned-in -- a heist in which it's the audience whose pockets have been picked.

Steven Soderbergh's unabashedly trivial sequel may be slim pickings, but when it works, it's a blast.

The real-life camaraderie of Clooney, Pitt, Damon and the rest translates to the screen with charm and verve.

In this sprawling oglefest, such things as 'narrative' and 'story' are remote little abstractions indeed.

The whole thing is a piffle of fluff or a fluff of piffle. About halfway through you'll get an incredible hunger to see a movie.

It's so well made and undeniably entertaining it should leap from tall buildings and wear a big 'S' on its chest.

The movie noisily conveys the messy joy of its making, and insists that you have a good time as well.

How many movies recapture the blithe spirit of Frank Sinatra and his Rat Pack, plus a sense of old-school star glamour?

Ocean's Twelve feels like a lark, a dashed-off confiture that isn't so much a movie as an excuse for a bunch of old friends to hang out in Europe with somebody else paying the bill.

Ocean's Twelve works like a short-term charm. In several years, you won't remember much about the movie except what a good time you had watching it.

We love these people like family, because they joke and whine and screw up just like our best friends would if our best friends were stealing $200 million.

Soderbergh and his scenarists, George Clayton Johnson, Jack Golden Russell and George Nolfi, are doing a jazz riff. This isn't a caper movie at all, it's an improvisation on caper themes.

This movie often seems like a big, swinging party with a can't-miss guest list.

Offers a cheap (relatively speaking -- ticket prices aren't what they used to be), stress-free, vicarious vacation.

Some of the bits are hysterical, but others fall flat.

Who doesn't want to see George Clooney nuzzling alongside Julia Roberts, sipping champagne on the patio of an Italian villa? They're just so darn attractive and wealthy looking and on top of the world.

A better press conference than a movie.

Hits a new low in condescending facetiousness, with no fewer than 15 performers of varying talents, tongues firmly in cheeks, undercutting all the genre's action conventions while camping up a storm on two continents.

It's the most high-end junk food imaginable, completely unnourishing and forgettable afterward, but delicious and all but impossible not to enjoy while it's in front of you.

This slickly entertaining sequel is all about savoring eye candy.

This embarrassing sequel to the 2001 remake of the old Rat Pack romp is bogus on a biblical scale -- a bunch of smug movie stars, goofing on their images, wandering through the wilderness for 40 years. Or what seems like it.

In keeping with his general distaste for sequels -- this is his first, in fact -- Soderbergh has subverted all of the usual conventions, making the movie far more interesting than it has any right to be.

Ocean's Twelve lacks the courage of its star-driven convictions.