DVD Roundup
Now Playing: Con Games
Steven Soderbergh has, throughout his career, confounded expectations through his choice of projects. His early body of work began with Sex Lies & Videotape?the film that arguably gave birth to the indie movement of the early '90's?continued with the difficult and idiosyncratic Schizopolis, and reached its zenith with The Limey. He then abandoned his art-house millieu to do Out Of Sight, a slick George Clooney vehicle that remains to this day not only the best adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel, but the best Jennifer Lopez performance committed to film. It wasn't a box office smash, and Soderbergh counterpunched with Traffic, a large scale examination of the pervasiveness of the drug trade that seemed caluclated to hit with audiences and Oscar alike. It worked like a charm on both counts. After Traffic, Soderbergh's films seemed to follow the pattern of the indie director who, in order to secure financing for smaller, personal projects, makes the occasional Hollywood blockbuster. His remake of the Rat Pack heist film Ocean's 11 (renamed Ocean's Eleven, perhaps in a display of Soderberghian playfulness) was a huge success, allowing both his remake of Tarkovsky's Solaris and the disastrous digital video improvisationFull Frontal. How surprising then, that instead of the expected Hollywood slam-dunk sequel, Ocean's Twelve ends up looking and feeling more like an effort from the earlier period of Soderbergh's career.

Still essentially an excuse to get a whole bunch of stars in a room together, Twelve's action hangs on the barest framework of plot. Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia), the mobbed up target of the first film's heist, has tracked down each of the members of Ocean's Eleven and presented them with an ultimatum: return the stolen money plus interest in two weeks or die. Not one to shrink from such a challenge, the gang's ringleader Danny Ocean (Clooney), who has been, with much difficulty, playing it straight with wife Tess (Julia Roberts), assembles the team and embarks on a series of heists throughout Europe to recover the money. Thwarting them along the way are an Interpol agent (Catherine Zeta Jones) who, improbably, is a former lover of Ocean's right-hand man Rusty Ryan (Brad Pitt); and an aristocratic French cat burglar, The Silver Fox (Vincent Cassel), who is out to prove his superiority to Ocean.

As in the first film, the viewer's pleasure comes not from the intricacies of the heist, as in traditional heist movies, but from the riffing of a big group of stars of varying magnitudes. It's clear that everyone is having a blast, and this lessened the first film for me?-the sense that there was a joke the audience wasn't in on soured the experience somewhat. That this film is more successful is, I think, owing to Soderbergh's stylistic decisions. Instead of delivering a stylistic copy of the first film, Soderbergh switches things up, directly quoting sixties ?Swinging London? era films, from the grainy film stock look to the hip looking sans serif title cards that guide us as we jump around times and locations. The film just feels playful, and it suits the actors, of whom there are so many that, save for the leads, their parts of necessity become glorified cameos. For their part, the actors are game, though it hurts a bit to see Bernie Mac's part reduced to a single gag and the estimable talents of Chinese acrobat Shaobo Qin used only for a joke about lost luggage at the airport. Elliott Gould and Carl Reiner, the best things about the first film, are barely in the film at all.

Soderbergh and screenwriter George Nolfi smartly realize that in order for the film to have the necessary lightness, it won't do to delve to deeply into details. Rather than give us a detailed scene in which Zeta Jones' character breaks down a captured man for information, he uses visual shorthand, pulling the camera back to the other side of the two-way mirror and having two police comment on the difficulty of the achievement even as he shows the suspect breaking down at a few words whispered in his ear. In one of the film's best sequences, Matt Damon and Don Cheadle (British accent unimproved from the first outing) trade fictional schemes for stealing a Faberge egg, one-upping each other with each one (sample: [I'm paraphrasing] ?Baby With the Bathwater.? ?No. You need five guys and anyway, you'll never train a cat that fast.?) It has the feel of two actors improvising and having a blast doing it. Knowing the plot is slight, Soderbergh keeps us entertained by means of his directorial bag of tricks?at one point, he cuts away from a burglary in progress, then shows us Zeta Jones' investigation the following day to show us how it went wrong. There's even a metafictional gag where Tess has to pretend to be Julia Roberts. If we dwell too long on any of this, the seams begin to show. Soderbergh keeps things moving with good energy and a groovy sense of style that was lacking in the first film. No, it's not a crime caper that even approaches Out of Sight in terms of satisfying construction and narrative. But it's a much better ?famous people having fun? lark than the first film. I mean, what other reason is there for this kind of film's existence if it ain't fun? Now, if Soderbergh takes the same approach of trying something new for his next ?indie? effort, we may be in for a real treat.

Criminal, an American remake of the Argentinian con film Nine Queens, was produced by Soderbergh and Clooney's Section 8 Films. It satisfies in all the ways a con movie should, and is helped along by a lean plot and a talented ensemble including John C. Reilly, Diego Luna and Maggie Gyllenhaal. However, it begs the same question as all remakes of foreign films: why? One assumes that the usual reason is to Americanize the more foreign aspects of a film for a US audience. However, Nine Queens already follows the template of that most American of genres, the con. It was shot in the gritty, handheld camera-style that is prevalent in Hollywood today?-in short, it's a very American-feeling film presented in another language. One might also assume that a reason to remake a foreign film is for an American writer to riff off the themes present in the original in order to approach the same themes from a different perspective. It was with this in mind that I watched Criminal, and was disappointed to find that the writers, Gregory Jacobs and "Sam Lowry" (none other than Soderbergh himself), follow the plot points of the original beat for beat. Aside from a couple of completely superficial changes (the opening scene takes place in a casino rather than a gas station; the con centers around a forged treasury note rather than a forged set of stamps), the film follows the original to the letter. Why on earth did they bother? Unlike say, The Ring, Nine Queens enjoyed first run art-house distribution in the States, and was readily available on home video, having built a modest following thanks to good reviews. I can't necessarily say the new version isn't as good as the original on its own merits, but its superfluousness makes it so. Still, I enjoyed the film, thanks mainly to its appealing cast. If you haven't seen Nine Queens and can't abide subtitles, this film is for you. If you enjoyed the original and would like to see different actors in the roles, by all means check it out. If you haven't seen either, and if you love con films and can read, I'd say the original is best.