
So lightweight it disappeared completely
2 of 3 people found this review helpful.
The follow up to the remake of 'Oceans Eleven' this is one of the best examples of Hollywood producers not knowing when to leave well enough alone, and trying to cash in on the success of an earlier film with trite rubbish.
It has all the technical quirks of the first that gave that film it's 'feel' (the Clooney/Pitt 'unfinished sentence' conversations, stop-motion cuts, quirky music etc.), but this is the proof that making a good film is like making a good quiche - you can have all the right ingredients but if you don't do it properly you just end up with a plate full of sludge.
It also helps to have a plot. What passes for the plot in this film is so absurd that it can't sustain a film even as lightweight as this.
Don Cheadle is still speaking his rather quaint Dick-Van-Dykelish, and the two brothers are still squabbling, but the other characters all seem to have undergone a peculiar metamorphosis. They appear to have been written by someone lacking the skill, which has drawn clumsily on second-hand clichés. Damon has become the weak-kneed, over-eager social conscience of the group; Gould has become bland; the Chinese acrobat still can't speak English but everyone else can understand him. Worst of all, Andy Garcia who was so wonderfully, and chillingly menacing in the first has become a joke of a bad-guy: a cane-carrying renaissance man who can tinkle the ivories, speak fluent Chinese and illogically doesn't kill the 11 when finds them - because a total stranger asked him not to. They are no longer characters but caricatures.
Then there's Catherine Zeta-Jones. She plays the beautiful (naturally) daughter-of-a-thief cop who specialises in 'master thieves', and has previously been involved with Pitt's character [yawwwwwn]....
You would have thought it would be impossible for a cast like this to make something so dire. Apparently it isn't.
I don't know how the film ended because I fell asleep, so it's stretching my personal rating system** to give this two stars, but I like watching the actors. Not that I missed anything. The end seemed predictable to me, and when I asked my daughter - who managed to stay awake - it turned out I was right.
Review ID: 10000000001662039

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