Ocean's 12 Was Tragically Underappreciated In Its Time
Rarely does a sequel live up to the hype of its predecessor. This is not because sequels are inherently bad—although many fall prey to the inherent pitfalls of grafting on to a self-contained story. Sequels must strike an exceedingly precarious balance between familiarity and novelty, replicating what fans enjoyed without retreading the exact same territory, and directors often struggle to deliver that balance. But more often, sequels fall prey to the hype itself: as fans wait impatiently for the next installment of a story, their expectations grow too big for any movie to satisfy, regardless of its merits.
Even good sequels may be received poorly by fans. Yet the culture of rewatching offers those misjudged films the opportunity to be reexamined and redeemed once the zeitgeist has passed—perhaps, even, to establish legacies independently of the franchises to which they belong. Ocean’s Twelve may not have been the sequel that fans expected, but it is a worthy successor to the subtle brilliance of Ocean’s Eleven, and it deserves to be celebrated in its own right.
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Audiences’ first mistake—made by critics and casual viewers alike—was to evaluate Ocean’s Twelve as a heist movie. It is not a heist movie, but an offbeat indie comedy, directed by one of the trailblazers of American independent cinema. While it might have been reasonable, initially, for viewers to expect a heist movie to be followed by a heist sequel, that expectation actually reveals one of the quirks of Ocean’s Eleven: the movie is ostensibly about a heist, but the tangled machinations of that heist were not what gave Ocean’s Eleven its staying power (much bad faith
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