i really, really loved ocean’s eleven, so imagine my surprise when this movie turned out to really, really suck. well, maybe it didn’t “suck,” per se — more like “inhaled a certain amount of crap.” either way, i was pretty disappointed with this sequel.

first of all, the cast didn’t seem to gel as well as they did in ocean’s eleven. the little asian dude (a.k.a. “the grease man”) was obnoxious and completely overdone, brad pitt wasn’t at all noteworthy, and george clooney was… well, george clooney, whom i usually dislike, anyway. and could they have used a little less make-up on julia roberts? i know she was pregnant in real life and everything, but honestly — i thought big budget movies usually spent an inordinante amount of money on making the actors look like mannequins. roberts looked like shit throughout. and catherine zeta-jones character? yeah, let’s just throw in another character that i could care nothing for. let’s see, what other a-list hollywood actors can we dig up to put in this film? how about jude law? he can be the handsome bus-boy they meet in an italian restaurant who turns out to be a woman whom linus once slept with in chicago.

second of all, the grift? it wasn’t so much as a grift as a “hey, let’s try to take this train of a movie, completely derail it, and then just go back to the beginning and tell the audience it wasn’t what they thought from the get-go!” (i think that explanation sufficiently hides what actually happens in the film, so please don’t call it a spoiler.) were the writers really that lazy? my writing from the fourth grade about lonely orphaned girls from the holocaust could have probably made a better script. well… i doubt it, but you get the idea. stylistically, ocean’s twelve is nothing to write home about. the first achieved a clean, suave look into the life of thieves, while the second was all over the place and just plain sloppy.

i suppose i’m just being cynical about ocean’s twelve because i had such high expectations for it. i was anticipating the same slick, sophisticated, smart story from the first film, and was met with a sloppy, awkward cop-out. the same thing happened with the edge of reason. disappointment all around.