Movie City Indie

And I don’t even like soufflé.

Steven Soderbergh’s all-American guilt complex must have kicked in like mad after the reception of Ocean’s Twelve, a movie that seemed more a calculated insult to audiences worldwide than a worthy diversion.

Honestly, I felt so bruised by the second of the Soderbergh-Clooney-Pitt capers that I can’t summon up a single clear memory of a moment of it. (I do remember seeing it while suffused with Dr. Pepper.) At the time, I wrote, “Dandelion fluff, cat dander, motes of dust: all these minor irritants have more substance than the dashed-off insult that is Ocean’s Twelve.” While Steven Soderbergh’s my-friends-are-so-hip-they-float Ocean’s Eleven makes an ideal companion on a transatlantic flight if you’re jacked up on antihistamines, the weightless, worthless spectacle of Ocean’s Twelve, pointlessly criss-crossing a few grainy patches of Europe, is little more than a vision of a dozen or more millionaires jacking off in a loose circle.” (Imagine how I felt. )

While there’s no real narrative tension in the new installment, it’s delightful in almost every frame and each particular. These characters are hoods, rogues, cads, and mean to some people who don’t really deserve it, but it’s all in the service of getting back at Willy Bank (Al Pacino), a macher who’s shoved their mentor, Reuben Tishkoff (Elliott Gould, whose mensch-tastic comic timing remains sterling at the age of 68) out of his percentage of Vegas’ latest mega-casino. Pacino: “I don’t need the labor pains! I just WANT the BABY!” The name of Pacino’s character is typical of the lightly brassy in-jokery in this edition: The notorious bank robber Willie Sutton was the one who answered, “Why do you rob banks?” with a reply of supernal logic: “Because that’s where the money is.” Thus: Willy Bank. (Pacino gets a few of his patent street-mongrel moments to howl and growl, and he’s man-tanned to the patina of a fine chocolate Lab.)

Really, Ocean’s Thirteen had me beaming from the opening credits, where the current Warner Bros. presentation credit, which is kind of dull, was monkeyed with in a way that’s both retro and now-retro, lightly jazzy, easy on the eyes. That animation draws on a similar marzipan palette to cameraman “Peter Andrews”’ (Soderbergh) visual style and Philip Messina's production design, filled with terrific oblong compositions, heavy on acute lines slashing across the frame in landscapes and hotel corridors, and deeply hued blues and reds and yellows and greens. There are other clever design strokes that work without footnotes, such as The Bank's twirling towers that yearn to the sky being a patent cop of Santiago Calatrava's odd apartment building in Malmo, Sweden, the HSB Turning Torso.

The plot is absurd and complications pile upon complications, to the point of creating a backup plan that involves a man-made earthquake effected by a manyton drill that dug the French side of the Chunnel. But it’s toothsome throughout. Herewith: Danny Ocean (George Clooney) and the gang go for their priciest, diciest heist after his double-cross of Reuben lands him in a hospital bed after a heart attack. Enter: Brad Pitt and Matt Damon, who throughout keep tongues thoroughly in dimpled cheeks and have a certain amount of fun with their public and personal profiles. Plus: Ellen Barkin vamping as Bank’s second-in-charge; Casey Affleck and Scott Caan, who wind up fomenting a labor strike at a Mexican maquiladora dice factory, fueled by Zapata tequila (named after the revolutionary, a comic foreshadowing of Soderbergh’s upcoming pair of pictures about Che Guevara). David Paymer gets some mileage as a painfully distressed undercover hotel-rater for the “Five Diamonds” status that Bank has earned for earlier elephants, and Carl Reiner plays a hi-ho cheerio chap whom the staff are fooled into believing is the actual reviewer while Ocean’s men do many painful things to Paymer.

Another in-joke: the ding-a-ling that 85-year-old Reiner’s Saul Bloom confects, Kensington Chubb, boasts an exceptionally tall and strange curly white quiff atop his head that makes him a dead ringer to 84-year-old Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone, with whom Soderbergh has likely had run-ins with in the egregious stall-outs at Paramount Pictures of his repeated attempts to make a film of “Confederacy of Dunces.” Soderbergh in-japed Redstone before: (An early working title of Full Frontal was “How To Survive a Hotel Room Fire,” a seeming reference to a notorious incident in the life of the long-lived mogul. A second attempt at naming that mulligatawny was “The Art of Negotiating a Turn,” which seems to apply as well to the man’s myriad moves in an eclectic career.

Ocean’s Thirteen demonstrates tremendous directorial command, and I still await every Soderbergh movie with intense expectation. (And I still remember the times he’s told me I’m a jerk for liking The Underneath, which is the movie that sent him into the push-me-pull-you pattern of his career.) Afterwards, I didn’t feel full from this larky malarkey, but I didn’t feel stuffed, I felt just right: Soderbergh + Co., including screenwriters Brian Koppelman and David Levien (Rounders) have captured their own cavalier, rico-suave, effortless tone with these “analog players in a digital world” that matches at least our false memories of how cool it must have been to be around Sinatra and that bunch before they kicked your fucking teeth in. I’m smiling, I’m smiling! ”Ocean’s Thirteen opens Friday at over 3,150 locations.] [Ray Pride.]