Ocean’s Twelve really annoyed me. For one, the plot was too fast and too complicated for me to follow closely. And since it was a heist movie, where the plot twist and turns and motives are the movie, I eventually gave up trying to understand it and just watched the stunts.

Warning: plot spoilers ahead!

But two things really stand out. One is that the ending was total deus ex machina. To quote from Stephen Hunter‘s review:

“It all ends on one of those infuriatingly sloppy notes where, having dramatized narrative events WXYZ for us, which we have taken on good faith, it suddenly and arbitrarily delivers narrative events STUV, which completely invalidate events WXYZ.”

Second, it gets all meta in an infuriating way. Julia Roberts plays Tess in this movie. But partway through, they say, “Hey, you know… Tess looks like Julia Roberts. Why doesn’t she pretend to be her?” So she does and that fools some people.

And that’s a little silly and a bit rabbit-out-of-a-hat of the writers, but it’s at least forgivable. The celebrity actors are consistent in their portrayal as normal people. Though there is some fourth wall breakage because one of those normal people references celebrity actors.

But then they do something heinous. Bruce Willis is sitting in a chair in a lobby and whoa, would you look at that, he’s actually Bruce Willis. This conceit is too much for me. If Bruce Willis can play himself, then why isn’t the audience allowed to go, “Hey, what is Brad Pitt doing robbing people? He always seemed so nice.”

It seems too much to have some famous actors in your movie being normal dudes and some randomly playing themselves. It’s supposed to be a pleasant fiction that the audience doesn’t recognize your actors. Asking them to selectively do so is awkward.

I would have rather watched a more classic heist movie, like the original Ocean’s, with just one big elaborate heist. It’d be much easier to follow and have more direct causes and effects. Point is, I don’t think I’ll see Ocean’s Thirteen.