In 2001, Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven, a remake of the 1960 Brat Pack film, burst on the scene. With its A-list stars and hip feel, it became a box office smash, earning over $450 million worldwide. While doing PR for Eleven in Rome in 2002, Soderbergh fell in love with the city and decided it would be a great place to set a sequel to Eleven – and thus, Ocean’s Twelve was born. Twelve picks up the action three years after Danny Ocean (George Clooney) and company’s successful heist of casino owner Terry Benedict’s (Andy Garcia) casinos. Danny and his ten cohorts have been lying low, but when someone tips off Benedict, he delivers an ultimatum to each of them: pay back the stolen money, with interest, or pay with their lives. As the group is too well-known to pull any jobs in the U.S., they go to Europe … and everything starts to fall apart. They get on the wrong side of both the law – in the form of Interpol agent Isabel Lahiri (Catherine Zeta-Jones), also a former flame of Ocean’s right-hand man Rusty (Brad Pitt) – and the notorious criminal The Night Fox (Vincent Cassel). This time, they may even need Danny’s wife Tess (Julia Roberts) to escape with the loot …

Twelve assumes the audience is familiar with Eleven and offers little or no back story. The whole original cast is back, with the addition of Zeta-Jones (who does a fine job) and French actor Cassel. The film has many clever references to Eleven and deftly incorporates the high stature of its stars (and all the press their lives receive) into both the screenplay and the feel of the film itself. Anyone who followed the media frenzy during the shooting of Twelve in Amsterdam and Italy knows how much fun the stars had, and it shows in the final film. Twelve has a more of an emphasis on the relationships between the characters and less emphasis on setting up the heists themselves, but it never takes itself too seriously. If you enjoyed Eleven, going for Twelve should be a sure thing.