Ocean's Twelve

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Thriller/US/English (Japanese subtitles)/116mins
Starring: George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Andy Garcia
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Warner Brothers

It is no news that Hollywood these days is suffering a crisis of the imagination. The Dream Factory's output in the last couple of years has included far more pointless remakes, sequels and desperate cash-in jobbies (Yes, Alien vs Predator, I am talking about you!) than is strictly healthy.

On paper Ocean's Twelve would seem to be a product of this malaise. It's predecessor, Ocean's Eleven, was a remake of the 1960 Sinatra caper of the same name, making Ocean's Twelve an apparently gratuitous sequel: the original had no follow up.

However, in the right hands a remake becomes an original in its own right, and so it is with the Ocean flicks. The director is, after all, Steven Soderberg, whose middle name might as well be 'aplomb', and whose back catalogue includes Erin Brockovitch, Solaris, and Sex, Lies and Videotape.

You get the feeling that this highly intelligent and casually talented director is making these films for fun — because he can. He mixes up all the standard memes of the caper yarn — the plot, the impossible mission, the women trouble, the fractious gang of lovable and talented crooks, the sharp dialogue — and eventually ends up with something more about the genre than of it.
In pragmatic terms, these digressions into thrillerdom will fund any number of future Soder-projects.

Oh, and I nearly forgot: the cast is a roll call of acting talent that actually have parts and dialogues they can do something with.
In the first film, Danny Ocean (George Clooney) and his gang rip
off Casino owner Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia) for oodles of dosh. In Twelve, Benedict catches up with Ocean: funnily enough, he wants his money back. The gang are forced out of retirement and into a string of jobs in some of the world's most picturesque cities, and then find to their chagrin that they have some serious competition from another phantom-like robber. So basically Twelve is a reprise of Eleven but it is a jolly yarn, and works for all the good reasons that the first film did.

The Bourne Supremacy

Coming Soon

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Starring: Matt Damon, Franka Potente, Joan Allen
Director: Paul Greengrass
Universal Pictures

In the first film, the Bourne Identity, Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) is hauled out of the ocean full of holes and quite improbably alive and of course without any memory of how he got into that state. And then he discovers he has considerable skills as a killer and a suitcase full of false identities. And then he finds that a bunch of similarly trained people are intent on killing him. Such is the tenacity and quantity of these bad guys that not even the high body count and the end of the film can get them off his tail, because here is another whole movie of similar stuff.

The plot, as with the first, is somewhat involved but revelations are meted out to the audience at just the right pace to keep you up with what's going on. Kind of. Bourne is hiding in India with his girlfriend when he is tracked down by a Russian assassin. Bourne
has to flee. A CIA oppo is found dead in Berlin and Bourne's finger prints are all over the crime scene … but since Bourne was in Goa
at the time of the killing, how did … ?

Fiendish inventiveness and some very shadowy people who may
or may not be the CIA are responsible of course. But why?
The answer might be in the nightmares and odd flashbacks that Bourne suffers but they never coalesce to the point of being helpful.

We didn't find out what this was all about in the first film and we don't in the second — not properly anyway. I guess we have to wait for number three, the Bourne Ultimatum (Ultimatum! Last movie: cute, hunh!).

As with the first of the series, this movie is a superior thriller:
It is pacy, and shot with impressive economy. The use of hand-held cameras gives an immediacy and even an edge of realism to the action. Matt Damon walks the acting tightrope with aplomb, conveying a convincing character in improbable circumstances, and even injecting pathos and poignancy into the role.

Film Reviews: Chris Page

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