Soderbergh's Players

The Player ended with Bruce Willis and Julia Roberts spoofing their status as the biggest movie stars in Hollywood. The last half hour or so of Ocean's Twelve takes that concept and runs with it, using the same two performers to spoof what it means to be a celebrity in today's culture. And the best surprise is that it works. This is easily the most disposable film of Soderbergh's career, but it is entertaining. Watching George Clooney's Danny Ocean and Brad Pitt's Rusty watch an episode of Happy Days dubbed into Italian makes for one of the biggest laughs of the year. When the cast is just sitting around and gabbing the film has a buzz to it - this is one of those rare cases where the actors obviously had a blast making that movie and those good vibes actually carry over into the audience. The actual plot in the film makes little sense and often the narrative threads that are established turn out to be intricate red herrings. But as I said before, this is a disposable piece of entertainment. Luckily it was made by people who know how to entertain.

Soderbergh's career has gone in two, or arguably three, phases and this film feels like an end to this phase. He has reached the end of the line of using his stars for just their star power and commenting on that star power as he does that. I'm not saying he needs to stop his collaborations with Clooney - Out of Sight and especially Solaris might be an indication of where Soderbergh may go - I'm simply suggesting that creating slick Hollywood entertainment filled with commentary on the fact that you are creating slick Hollywood entertainment is a dead end for any artist and Soderbergh is bright enough to know this.