Ocean’s Twelve
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Writer: George Nolfi, based on characters created by George Clayton Johnson and Jack Golden Russell
Producer: Jerry Weintraub
Stars: George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Matt Damon, Andy Garcia, Vincent Cassel, Bernie Mac, Don Cheadle, Scott Caan, Casey Affleck, Elliot Gould, Carl Reiner, Shaobo Qin, Eddie Jemison

There is the heist movie where we root for our heroes to pull it off, then there is the one where we realize with dread that they won’t get away with it. Ocean’s Eleven, the 2001 remake of the 1960 Rat Pack vehicle about knocking over a Vegas casino, was the former, as is this sequel. Watching with faith that our heroes will somehow come out on top, our enjoyment lies in the discovery of details – details about how impossible the job is, and the details of how they overcome those impossibilities.

The details in the first effort from Clooney and the gang were impeccable – every member of the “Eleven” had a clear task to attend to, and the heist they pulled off was paced well and enjoyably ridiculous while keeping that single all-important stretching toe on the line of plausibility. Like good soul music, you could enjoy the style because the groove was locked in tight. But in Ocean’s Twelve, after going through the motions of reassembling the entire crew, the story labors heavily to keep track of them all, and eventually resorts to just throwing increasing numbers of them in jail to lessen confusion.

If it feels as if they’ve been grafted onto a story that cannot hold their weight, it’s because this is exactly what happened – George Nolfi’s script, originally titled Honor Among Thieves, was set up for John Woo to direct. These characters were dropped in after the financial failure of director Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris and Clooney’s directing debut Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (both underrated and worth a look) made this sequel what an agent would call “smart business”. At least they decided to have some fun in fulfilling this obligation, but unfortunately not all of that fun is passed along to the audience.

In the beginning, the object was to take down slimy casino magnate Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia). But there was an emotional quest involved too; it was a way for Danny Ocean (Clooney) to demonstrate his love for ex-wife Tess (Julia Roberts), and in the end you could appreciate the design of both story threads. Now we open with Benedict tracking down the people who robbed him, one by one, and demanding his $160 million back, with interest.

He gives them two weeks to do this, but the deadline is utterly arbitrary, since it never precludes our gang from anything they want to do, be it shuttling across several countries in Europe or finding the right equipment to lift a house from underwater. In the process of finding big-dollar heists to pull off on short notice, they learn not only who gave their identities to Benedict, but why.

And then the story ceases to be about Benedict at all, but about a slimy French cat burglar named the Night Fox (Vincent Cassel), a legendary retired thief named La Marque, and the aborted fling between Ocean right-hand man Rusty Ryan (Brad Pitt) and Interpol detective Isabel Lahiri (Catherine Zeta-Jones). These are likely the main players in the movie that would have been Honor Among Thieves, and they look like they don’t realize that they have been demoted to the rank of pretext.

In this day and age it’s an impressive feat just to assemble so much star-wattage in one movie. Clearly the lure was a chance to reunite for the laughs they enjoyed before, and go to beautiful cities and wear smashing clothes and say witty things and just generally celebrate their own amazing-ness.

I have no objection to that on principle, it was part of the charm of the first. Director Soderbergh is still a master of staging and rhythm, and in acting as his own director of photography (as always, under the pseudonym “Peter Andrews”) he uses natural lighting and rich color to stunning effect. The scenery, primarily Amsterdam and Rome, is to die for and everyone does indeed dress well. The collective charms of the cast do manage to carry things along for longer than you might think, although with the number of cameos it does have a clowns-tumbling-out-of-a-Volkswagon effect after awhile.

But eventually your own smile wears off, and you realize that these people you paid to entertain you are now focused entirely on entertaining themselves. Ironically, the most laughs-per-minute of screen time goes to Chinese acrobat and non-actor Shaobo Qin, who re-defines the problem of lost luggage.

The second half of the movie wobbles and lists under a series of surprises and double-crosses, and without giving too much away I must say that in the end the audience is fundamentally cheated. We’re subjected to that tired device where we stop the movie so the actors can grin and tell us what really happened. A good heist movie inspires us to think along with the gang. A bad heist movie prevents us from thinking then condescends to us about what we didn’t know.

And our glamorous movie stars are too preoccupied with kidding each other about how beautiful and rich and successful they are to do anything about it – in an extended cameo, yet another huge movie star comes along and gets to brag about the worldwide box office gross of his biggest hit (really, Bruno, do we care?).

If at this point you are asking what any of this has to do with a heist, you are asking the question that sticks the knife right into this ultimately wearying movie, a reunion party that just drags on too long. The end scenes involve our triumphant gang getting together for a night of poker, and I was disappointed to conclude I would rather have watched two hours of that.

When Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon) describes FBI Special Agent Brian Shepard (Scott Bakula) as “a good listener”; it is all but a declaration of love at first sight. Whitacre himself is not much of a listener, at least to others – his brain is racing full-time with shifting thoughts, trivial musings, and self-aggrandizement. He is speaking with Agent Shepard in order to become a corporate whistleblower, and will spend three years undercover at his own company, collecting evidence of a billion-dollar fraud. The Agent and his partner (Joel McHale) marvel at Whitacre’s ability to live two lives.

What they fail to understand it that this is not a torture to him, but a dream come true. The Informant! – based on the gripping book by former New York Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald – is about a man who stopped living just one life a long time ago. In the life most people see he is a dweebish but highly-capable biochemist rising through the corporate ranks of ADM, one of the world’s largest food-products manufacturers. They can do things with an ear of corn that would startle you. But Whitacre has other lives – more fantastical, grandiose ones – as an orphan who made good out of some Dickensian turns of fortune, or as a guy with a swell idea for a TV show; and now, thanks to Agent Shepard, he gets to be the chipper, downstate version of Tom Cruise in The Firm.

Eichenwald’s book about the real-life price-fixing case built on the foundation of Whitacre’s testimony and wire recordings is an addictive read, because just as the intrigue about the case settles into procedure, the secret intrigue around Whitacre begins to unfurl itself. It earns its page-turning power because of how unbelievable is each successive act and revelation, how it makes you realize how little you can really know someone.

What filmmaker Steven Soderbergh has done is to seize on that essential truth, and bring all his prodigious tools to work mining it. The Informant! is not a follower on the path of Michael Mann’s The Insider, which another filmmaker might have made, but rather is an awesome cinematic joke, a pie in the face of America’s self-deluding hero complex, resting on a performance by Matt Damon free from all physical or psychological vanity.

Whitacre has a large house in Decatur, Illinois, several expensive cars, and a humble and endlessly-loyal wife played by a quietly superb Melanie Lynskey. At the office he comes off as well-meaning if gauche, technically-versed but given to flashes of awkward temperament. When he reports to his superiors that one of their plants has fallen victim to industrial sabotage, and that an executive from a Japanese rival is asking for a healthy bribe to make their problems go away, it is taken seriously enough that they call in the Feds.

And it is in a moment of desperate conscience that Whitacre confesses to the Agent who comes to this house that he has been involved for years in a worldwide scheme to fix the price of lysine, an amino acid with uses everywhere along the food-making chain. Stealing five extra cents a day from every American at their breakfast table turns out to add up to a pretty nice sum after awhile. He volunteers to help record the secret, informal meetings held in drab hotel conference rooms around the globe.

As a procedural, The Informant is plenty entertaining just because it feels so minutely ordinary and real. So many thrillers and cop shows boil down to gadget porn – investigators working out of cavernous, moodily-lit spaces with more flat screen monitors than a sports bar, using sci-fi technology that has lots of colors and beeping noises. Whitacare has a briefcase with a tape recorder inside it – one that doesn’t work reliably, at that. This feels much more like what a government budget would buy. And one can never imagine a high-stakes surveillance in something like 24 getting threatened because someone moved a lamp in front of the video camera.

But this is just one layer of the story – the other is about Whitacre’s crowded inner life. And it’s on this level that the first half of the movie plays like an inscrutable aesthetic puzzle. Composer Marvin Hamlisch’s score won’t seem like a triumph initially – it is loud, insistent, and feels forty years behind the times with its alternately jaunty and ominous arrangements, its way of commenting directly on action rather than complementing it. The more you understand Whitacre, though, the more you realize that this is the soundtrack in his own brain, the more wickedly amazing it is. Soderbergh has both the imagination to conceive of his specific treatment of the story, and the technical mastery to execute it so smoothly you barely notice the second half of the movie until it starts clubbing you like a clown with a stuffed sock.

Psychologists describe narcissism as a black hole that sucks in those around the narcissist. In The Informant!, Soderbergh and Damon show us how Whitacre’s place as the point-man in this groundbreaking case fed all his brain’s worst impulses, and how everyone around him got hitched to a train that wasn’t going the direction they thought it was. It is a comedy of frustration, about a man who believes he is outsmarting everyone long after he has already scripted his own undoing. You can see the agony in Agent Shepard – Bakula plays it so earnestly, perfectly square – as he struggles to understand why Whitacre would do the things he’s doing. Whitacre can’t answer – if he did, we might stop listening.