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| AND THEN THERE WERE
TWELVE...
ocean's twelve
Clooney and Cheadle on Amsterdam station (the sequence was actually filmed in nearby Harlem) |
When George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh first announced they were going to remake Ocean’s Eleven, a Vegas caper movie which had originally starred Frank Sinatra and the rest of the Rat Pack, there were muffled expressions of surprise. Soderbergh, after all, had just made Traffic, a gritty ‘big issue’ movie about the international drugs trade, and before that Erin Brockovich, another serious film with a strong message. Ocean’s, by contrast, was pure escapism.
That, though, was the point: Soderbergh has always enjoyed jumping from small-scale personal movies to big studio locomotives. And any doubts about the pulling power of this particular locomotive were silenced when Ocean’s Eleven went on to take almost $450 million at the international box office.
That figure made a sequel more or less inevitable. And, never one to follow a successful original with a pale copy, the director shifted the focus for the new film from one desert town to a whole continent ripe for robbing: Europe.
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