Toy Story 4 (2019)
Movie Watch
Woody has always been confident about his place in the world and that his priority is taking care of...
Mad Men - Season 1
TV Season
Season one takes place between March and November 1960. It introduces the fictional advertising...
Swordfish (2001)
Movie Watch
When the DEA shut down its dummy corporation operation codenamed SWORDFISH in 1986, they had...
Granta 119: Britain
Book
In 2012, Britain is a nation in flux, managing difficult socioeconomic realities, contending with...
Sustainability Planning and Collaboration in Rural Canada: Taking the Next Steps
Lars K. Hallstrom, Mary Beckie, Glen T. Hvenegaard and Karsten Mundel
Book
Rural communities, often the first indicators of economic downturns, play an important role in...
Faber & Faber Poetry Diary 2017: Coral
Book
The Faber poetry list, originally founded in the 1920s, was shaped by the taste of T.S. Eliot, who...
The Cactus
Book
Susan Green doesn't like surprises - she likes to be in control. But at 45 her perfect life starts...
Fiction
Ab Workout Free - Abdominal Crunch Exercise Workouts
Health & Fitness and Sports
App
New year, new you! Ab Workout can help shape and tone your abdominal muscles today. ***** Ab...
Mayhawke (97 KP) rated Ocean's Twelve (2004) in Movies
Feb 7, 2018
It has all the technical quirks of the first that gave that film it's 'feel' 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 descriptive skill, who 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 Eleven 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.
Tediously predictable ending.
What a waste of time, money, effort and people.