Ocean's Twelve: The Lost Rewrite

Synopsis: Ocean's Twelve had excellent acting and direction, but a flimsy story that made all their efforts basically pointless. This is long, but here's how I would've fixed it - basically, my rewrite.

I may be missing something about "Oceans' 12". I hope I am, just like it seems everybody but me who saw "Adaptation" misunderstood or just plain missed so much of the movie's marvelously layered recursiveness.

So maybe I missed something important.

There's a bit at the end where Rusty (Pitt) says something about Lemarc having helped set up the whole Night Fox business. Maybe there was something there that I missed - like maybe it was a really elaborate set up for an even bigger Bellagio heist and to get Isabel (Zeta-Jones) back in touch with her long lost father.

Maybe it was all about that, instead of a careless comment by an old man that enraged the petty vanity of a playboy master-thief into delivering the identities of eleven people into the clutches of a mob-connected casino owner who would have them all killed.

But if there was something like that, everyone else seems to have missed it, too. So let's get to how I would have changed it:


I'm going start with a digression. (I'm always digressing; it's pretty much all I ever do... but I digress.) Oceans Twelve was packed with amazing acting, excellent direction, and some very clever jokes, all wasted on a terrible story.

But whole nonesense with stealing the egg on the train, that's Deus ex Machina - it's too easy. What I mean is this:

In high school, we once had this story writing workshop. As a class, we came up with a story of a boy followed a dog after school. (Each part was by suggestion - we'd raise our hands and get called on, then suggest the next part: Main character? "A boy." "OK, a boy, what's he doing?" "Leaving school." "OK, what happens? "He sees a dog.")

As night began to fall, our wayward child found he'd wandered far away from his familiar environs. A rock concert was starting and all sorts of crazed people rushing around. He wanted to get away from them. Now he was very lost. Someone picked his pocket. He found a payphone, but the phone didn't work (the teacher needed to help us with that one, because that would've likely ended the story).

Now, we had the stage set for the boy to face down his fears, maybe to go through the night and discover at sunrise that he'd survived, survived seeing rats and crazed homeless people and all these things, or, more importantly, survived his own fears of them.

In the light of a new day, he could find his way back home, wiser for the experience, a bit of a coming-of-age story.

Or something like that. We hadn't decided. We weren't there yet.

We were still with him very lost and scared and in the bad part of town. The whole night, the whole adventure... the whole story, in fact, lay in front of him.

Trying to come up with where the story would go next, one of the students suggested, "His grandmother could be driving by just then and happen to see him, and take him home."

Bang. Story aborted. The woman leading the workshop gave the reasons why that wouldn't work, among them that it's someone else solving his problems, instead of the character actually doing something or going somewhere.

Of course, it could have ended badly and still been a story, but if grandma drove by just then and drives him home to play video games, that's pretty boring. There's no story anymore.

End digression.




I mean, end digression number one.



The problem in Ocean's Twelve is there's this whole elaborate problem set up, and then basically grandma drives by and takes the boy home.

The exchange was simply, incredibly simply, made on a train by staging a goofy diversion while the egg was ludicrously unguarded. The egg and the theft and the brilliant Julia Roberts joke, it all just fizzles.

(Which makes me wonder if I missed something, if there was no egg theft at all... but I can't figure out how that fits with the rest of the story... just like I can't figure out why they had to go through with the whole thing, twice. If the egg was already stolen, what was that bit with the hologram and getting arrested about?

Which is why I'm guessing it was something to do with pulling Isabel in... somehow. But it's tied together poorly.)

In the first movie, they needed all these different guys with all sorts of expertise - needed eleven people all with expertise in their areas, and that was keeping the number to the absolute minimum (which, of course, they were motivated to do for both financial and security reasons).

In this one, half the cast is just hanging around. In fact, all those characters are so useless to the plot that most of them spend crucial parts of the film sitting around jail cells, doing nothing - one of them for virtually the whole film.

Come on.

So run the story basically as it is up to the end, the first end before any flashbacks, but with some tweaking - like there's no idiotic funeral scene.

(Great, opening scene, by the way - just brilliant. Great bit in the Amsterdam cafe, with the forced laughter and the bizarre free verse. That and so much more. All flushed away by a pointless story.)

After the Amsterdam gig falls apart, which it does a little worse than in the original, they take flight in panic, with Interpol (or Europol) breathing down their necks, and in mortal fear of gangsters or whatever.

Then we run the movie basically as it went.


Now, here's the changes:

Baron Cassel's challenge is made.

Remember that decoys are used when the egg travels, and sometimes even it's a decoy that's displayed.

Thus, even the museum officials don't know if they're showing a decoy (just so long as it would only be known to be a decoy on very, very close inspection - since the public and even museum experts would be kept back a certain distance).

That is, the museums accept the possibility of receiving a replica. Due the necessity of extreme security, even the local museum curator isn't allowed to get close enough to know if her museum was displaying the replica or not.

OK, so remember that in the original version (OV hereafter) LeMarc had stolen the egg already, but his wife had made him put it back? We can work with that - in this version, he never put it back.

In the revised version (which, following the obvious logic by which we obtained OV, we'll abbreviate as ZVXXRQWLTVAZG...), the job is actually to put the egg back, and with no one noticing.

Because, the truth is, the egg was stolen years ago, and ONLY the replicas have been traveling and shown since then.

It's such a catastrophe and embarrassment for the museum that's supposed to be holding the real thing that they've never let it be known.

(We could imagine, for example, the same thing happening if the Mona Lisa were swiped from the Louvre. The painting is now behind thick, tinted glass. It's not very big and the public is kept back from it. If they replaced it with an expert copy, one worked directly from the original (using lasers to trace, and thus replicate, the artist's original brushstrokes, and so on), who would know, who could possibly?

On extremely close inspection by a top expert, the colors might be ever-so-slightly off. But, well, the tinted glass takes care of that rather nicely, doesn't it?)

But now Lemarc has to replace the original, and because there are only fakes, the security is ultra-tight on the fake, even tighter than on a real one, to keep up the show. Thus, it's almost impossible to get at the replica.

And Lemarc is old now. He hasn't the young man's agility that allowed him to pull of his spectacular thefts. But he still has the brilliance, and now it's coupled with a wisdom in the ways of human behavior.

But who has that agility? Who that would put it to the use of replacing a replica with the real thing, of pulling a theft in reverse and thus getting no reward or glory for it?

Well, Lemarc's protege, Baron Cassel, certainly has both the agility and the ability, but he's vain. The juice for him is being the best thief in the world (behind his mask of the Night Fox, of course).

Lemarc thinks of Cassel first, but quickly realizes there's no way Cassel would do this, even for him. He concludes that Cassel, for all his admiration and gratitude, is ultimately loyal to nothing beyond his own ego.

And if Cassel were to be entrusted with the real egg, he would be too tempted. Even if he wanted to replace it, he'd give in to his bad side and disappear with it, most likely setting up a fake theft at the museum to make it look like he'd pulled off the heist of the new century.

But who else in the world is capable of such a thing? Who could possibly be?

Well, there was that heist in Vegas...


So here's what happened:

Lemarc, using his protege's egotism, baited Cassel into going after the Ocean's Eleven team. When he does that, they seem to us, through most of the movie, to be trapped, screwed. They have no choice but to accept Lemarc's challenge.

There's another problem - the real Faberge egg has long since been sold. Lemarc made a fortune off it.

It made so much money for him that it was a hang-up-your-gloves sort of deal, and once he made that theft and sale, he could disappear into retirement, whereabouts completely unknown.

The only way to even find out where the egg went is by way of a wealthy and eccentric agoraphobic collector who is, in reality, the fence for priceless objects.

(He's, let's say, the only guy in the world a master-thief would go to to make the sale of swiped a Van Gogh or a Picasso, and the only guy a billionaire wanting purloined works would trust. He's crucial, and this is the real reason his house so is heavily secured, though of course it also does contain treasures of its own.)

He's the guy Lemarc used to fence the egg. And nothing would ever make him reveal where it went.

So, first problem is to find the location of the real egg. To get to that, they'd have to hit this house in Amsterdam. But that's impossible. What to do?

Well, the Ocean team figures out that they have to raise the house. Interestingly, it's the Rusty character who makes (or is it just seems to make?) the connection with the legendary Lemarc heists.

Bang, they hit that house. The stock certificate is gone when they get there, but what we learn at the end is that that's fine with them - they actually needed Cassel to get in before them and steal that in order to cover their real purpose, which was to get to the agoraphobic's ultra-secret client list.

(N.B.: This nicely explains that stupid, pointless theft of the stock certificate.)

Now they have the location of the egg.

We move on to heist number two, the real heist of the film, though we don't even know about it until the end.

This could be anywhere. It involves what seems to everyone (to us in the audience, to the Europol agents, and especially to Cassel) to be a long meandering detour.

Let's say that when it looks like they missed the stock certificate, they panic and all flee, going off to Siberia or wherever under assumed identities.

They can't access even their secret bank accounts without somebody realizing it. They used what cash they had to get the hell out of Amsterdam in hurry and hide out as far away from everything as they could get, where no one would ever find them or even bother to think of looking.

If they turn up on anyone's radar, they're dead.

We also see that Cassel knows all along where they are, as, possibly, does Europol.

But they're out of everyone's way, not doing anything illegal - they're obviously a defeated and broken bunch. If they ever try to return, they'll be picked up on relatively minor charges but for now, might as well leave them to mildew away where they are. With them out of the way, Cassel doesn't care what they do, etc.

But what they (we learn at the end) were really doing was the movie's real heist: The egg had been bought by a Russian billionaire, who kept it near his oilfields in Siberia (where he could watch the Northern Lights from his terrace - nice effect for the film).

They seemed to be going as far way from everything as possible, but in fact they were, knowing that they were under constant survellience, just faking it, faking the panic.

While they were going somewhere really remote where "no one will ever find us, or even bother to look", they were actually going towards their destination, which was the egg.

(Imagine the possibilities here for a moment. They, in their "panic", decide to go set up false identities. Carl Reiner could have been an ex-Communist general, the others could be oilfield workers... Brad Pitt would have been disguised as an ex-soldier who seemed to us to have become a real drunk... and we'd believe, while watching it, that this was all what they'd done to run away and hide.)

They could even go to different parts of the world - one to China, say, because a cargo plane would be flying in with equipment for the oil field (although actually flying out with the egg).

We'd realize afterwards that during their time there none of them had ever actually spoken a word except something like "Da!" (hence, for example, Brad Pitt's impersonation of a severe alcoholic - he was always in such a stupor he'd just slur out some nonsense and no one would ever realize he wasn't a Russian ex-soldier who ended up a drunk like so many others.

The former General would have been too dignified from his past and mortified by his present situation to speak as he sat in back of the local restaurant slurping his borscht, and so on. Would've been brilliant.)

So they pull of the real theft, from the Russian oil billionaire. This one is stunning. And uses all of their separate skills.

(The Chinese cargo had a certain acrobat hidden in one of the pipes, which a "special crew" of foreign engineers working at the oil field installed one day - a pipe which actually led to a tunnel the Russian billionaire used when he wanted to go from his palace to the oil fields during those ferocious Siberian blizzards, a tunnel left over from the Soviet missile program. And it's in that bunker that the egg, under security that might as well be for nuclear missiles, is kept.

That's where our billionaire keeps an absolute trove of many of other of the world's greatest missing artworks, some of which the Ocean's team help themselves to - their cut of the action.

I like this because there'd be a chance to, at least briefly, raise a few issues - like, for one, where wealth comes from and who are the real thieves, is it people who make heists of single precious objects from some very wealthy individuals, whose lives won't really be affected at all by the loss, or is it ones who take far more from far greater numbers of people, leaving a lot of suffering because of it.

(Not as preachy or exposition-heavy as it might seem - the planning for the heist could touch on, or show, how the ex-KGB and the like just looted everything when so-called Communism collapsed (kind of, ah, the way America is being looted now that so-called democracy has collapsed).

You could talk about these things, or at least give a few pointers in that direction, and do it gracefully enough the audience would barely notice the message part.

It could also easily touch on what's happened to the former Soviet nuclear weapons program, which is terrifying from a possibility-of-terrorism perspective, among others... which could set up a sequel, where with the stakes the highest, they have to waltz in and carry off this crucial operation of, say, disabling a rogue nuke, all the while as cool as can be, Clooney oozing charm and so on, just like high-stakes poker players have to keep it all under control.).)

OK so, now, this is where they're desperate, totally screwed, no hope of ever seeing their former lives (or wives) again. And it's at this point that Cassel, the egotist steps in. He thinks he's got them where he wants them - totally defeated. But he's still needled that they pulled off the spectacular Vegas job. Everyone talks about that as the greatest.

And since they are, obviously, now incapable of any sort of heist, he sees no risk at all in challenging them. If he wins, which he will, of course, everyone will know that the Night Fox is the unimpeachable master thief of the world, while the Ocean team, being so diminished, will most likely end up in jail. (Cassel knows they're being watched by Europol, although he doesn't know that they also know this... and we don't either.)



To the museum heist:

What we learn at the end was that the whole set up at the museum was faked (which, in OV, seems so utterly pointless if they already had the egg and had won... they all get photographed and profiled by Interpol, risking everything just to piss off Cassel a little? Or to lure Isabel?

Even worse, it stretches disbelief beyond breaking that someone's mom could just show up impersonating a "Section Chief" and drive off with an entire group of internationally wanted criminals...

Although maybe it's some sort of comment on police corruption in Italy or something, because also seems pretty improbable that someone commonly accepted to have engaged in severe criminal behavior could be prime minister of Italy and allowed to keep the job of running the entire country because... he'd managed to delay his prosecution long enough that a court ruled that now the time limit to prosecute him had passed. I digress.)

(Of course, it also would seem pretty incredible that the president of France could be highly suspected of some criminal acts of his own but unprosecutable because the president of the country is immune to prosecution...

Oh, that makes sense: You wouldn't want to be able to do anything about it if the guy running the country turned out to be guilty of criminal acts. Um... am I digressing again?)


In the movie as it is, at the end, we learn that the story was over basically before it began, so what was the point of it all? The switch was already made, in a heist that five drunks propping up any bar could have worked out. No mastery involved.

That's a huge let-down for us, the audience, and it leaves the Night Fox as by far the best, as it took a whole team of them to accomplish that totally amateurish job, while he waltzed into the museum through the impossible security, solo, even if it was steal a replica.

That bothers us, and it should: On that bridge in Amsterdam Ocean and Brad Pitt talk about how in their souls they're basically thieves - not snatch-an-old-lady's-purse-on-welfare-check-day type thieves, but jewel-thief types, they're Cary Grant on Monte Carlo rooftops.

If that's what they are in their souls, then what's with the stupid purse-snatching bit on the train? Might as well snatch old-ladies' purses.

And did the couriers have to set out the incredibly valuable egg, accompanied by a special security detail, in a backpack not only right there on the seat, but on the aisle seat, where someone could've just walked by and run off to the cafe car with it?

I mean, the swithceroo wouldn't have been any harder if it was on the inside one... in fact, it would have been even better from the movie-making standpoint, as the security team would have momentarily all turned away from it.

As it is, the commotion makes them all turn towards it, absolutely what the thieves don't want to happen.

Better to have a pigeon hit the window. (And they could have done that: As long as they were going with goofy backpack-switch-on-the-train version, they might as well have had one or two of the team (useless anyway) on top of the train swinging a pigeon on a string.



In our revised version, Cassel goes into the museum to scope it out, carrying a replica he's had made, a replica for what he thinks is the real egg, the one on display. He goes in the day Julia Roberts shows up, giving a point to that whole thing, because in the crush of the crowd, one of the Ocean team switches Cassel's replica for the real egg (that they've stolen from the Russian billionaire).

So now Cassel, unknowingly, has the real egg. (He could even, between then and the time he goes in for real, show what he thinks is his "replica" to an expert, who says, "Incredible! It appears an utterly perfect copy! Without spectrometry tests, even I could never distinguish it from the original.

"It's almost too amazing. It's even got the exact wear patterns. For example, this nick where the little Tsarina's ring scratched it more than a century ago. I can't imagine how anyone could have gotten that level of detail... Almost no one even knows about that."

That was Cassel's one chance, the one crucial clue he could have picked up on. (Even when we watch it again at the end, we hold our breath for a moment while shadow of doubt crosses his face, and wonder if he'll catch on - even though we already know he didn't.)

That way, it's (again) Cassel's own ego that's his downfall. A slightly lesser or slightly more humble thief might have wondered about that. Might have turned and re-examined his replica and gotten thinking.

(It's a bit like Mohammed Ali's famous right-hand lead in Zaire against George Foreman - a boxer of that level would never have to worry about such a thing. As Norman Mailer said, to even train for it would have been an insult to that level of boxer, and thus Foreman was completely and effectively surprised to get smashed again and again by Ali's rights.

Cassel, similarly, would never have even considered or wasted energy on something as basic as a switcheroo being put over on a world class master-thief like himself.)

So now Cassel does his capoera through the lasers, and zips in to switch his "replica" - actually the real egg - for the decoy that the museum has on display (and there was no reason Cassel couldn't have been a bit more likeable - I loved the bit where he jauntily clicked his heels after making it through).

He gets out, thinks he's got the real thing (hasn't even bothered to have to examined yet), pulls up at his place in Italy, finds his guests on the terrace and so on.

And the apparent theft attempt with "Julia Roberts" isn't one. They make the switch for the hologram as in the original version, but the hologram immediately malfunctions with a momentary flicker, which is how they're caught - Zeta-Jones spots the flicker. The thing is, a second later they swap the hologram base back out and replace the egg.

She doesn't see that part. We don't either. So when she stops them at the exit, they're clean.

In this version, Bruce Willis has a role besides comic relief: When Zeta-Jones insists on detaining them, Willis still believes she's the real Julia Roberts and starts playing prima-donna (primo-don?), shouting about who he'll call and so on.

Just then, the local carabineri chief shows up absolutely livid about the forged 1077, which has pulled a score of his men off more important duties.

He's convinced Isabel has lost her marbles. Not only has she committed a severe violation of the rules for some wacky personal obsession, now she's using that same forged 1077 to direct those same carabineri to harass not just one but, incredibly, two A-list celebrities, risking worldwide embarrassment for his police detachment not to mention the effective end of his career.

Bruce Willis is screaming about calling Pavoratti - starts dialing him on the cell phone (how 'bout a cameo of Pavoratti himself rushing up shouting). Isabel insists she's an official with Europol and these people have just stolen - and have in their possesion - the Faberge egg. She insists they be searched.

Bruce Willis is turning purple, Pavaratti's about to have a heart attack, and "Julia Roberts" is fainting again while her "doctor" starts shouting his head off, too. Isabel, unflappable, pulls rank and demands they be searched. Bruce Willis sticks his face in hers and says, "You can search me naked if you want but you're not touching my pregnant friend here."

Everyone agrees that "Julia Roberts" must be left unmolested. Zeta-Jones does still have some official authority however, even though the carabineri chief is by now screaming and turning purple himself. They finally settle on searching everyone else, and letting "Julia Roberts" pass through a metal detector set on maximum sensitivity, since there's no way to conceal the presence of a big hunk of metal from the detector (even with a fake pregnant belly). She takes her bracelets and rings and everything and walks through. The detector goes off.

We hold our breath.

She looks down at her shoes, which have big ornamental silver buckles. She backs up, kicks them off, and walks through with no problems.

Isabel is finally stunned. Everyone else is relieved the whole thing is over and a very distressed "Julia Roberts" is helped to her car by a marvelously solicitous Bruce Willis, while the carabineri chief is deciding whether to have Zeta-Jones fired or arrested and Pavarotti starts signing autographs.

Then there's a little amusing denouement to that scene where she has to get away from Bruce Willis.



Now, of course, once we see all the flashbacks and know what's actually happened, we're still left with a big question: Why?


And that's where Lemarc comes in. Like they said in another movie, "You can't show Jaws in the first reel."

They have to save Lemarc for the end. He's the biggest mystery man in the world, and he can't just be some guy who casually talks things over on terrace overlooking the Trocadero in Paris.

Now we have the real reason. Remember how Lemarc's wife made him put the egg back. Well, consider that in OV he did put it back, but she still left him, told him if he ever went near their daughter again she'd inform on him. So that's a bit of the story that doesn't make sense.

Here's how we fix it (lotta fixing to do here, but it's worth it):

What actually happened was that he refused to do so. For one thing, he'd already sold the egg and had no idea where it went. More importantly, such a move went against everything he believed in about his honor as a thief.

And... he was also a bit stubborn, in those days something of an egotist himself (hence his thorough understanding of the character of Cassel).

But now the egg has been resold to a crooked Russian billionare. Lemarc's growing old and wants to spend time with his daughter again.

Thing is, he's too old to get the egg from the billionare's bunker. He doubts even Cassel is capable of it.

The only people he can think of who might have any chance are that team that pulled of the Bellagio heist in Vegas, a heist so well-executed it even stunned Lemarc, the greatest of them all. And he starts using his master-thief genius to track them down.

But this is going to take even more talent, including Cassel. The Ocean crew can't do both the Russian billionaire theft and the museum heist. Too much planning required, too much set up.

So they need someone good enough to get into the museum, which, though pretty much impossible, is actually the easier part of the job. Hence, Cassel.

Lamarc sets up the discussion on the yacht to prick Cassel's ego. Cassel falls for it. And, at the end of it all, though even Cassel doesn't know it (he just thinks he's been beaten), the real Faberge egg is back in place.

A very, very select group do know it, however. One is a top art expert, a renowned curator who once fell in love with a dashing and cavalier young man who seemed to know everything about art, who loved priceless treasures as much as she did, yet strangely didn't seem to work in the field.

He'd told her he was an amateur scholar, an aficionado. Always had plenty of money. And it wasn't until after she got pregnant, during the wildest days of her life and the greatest love affair she could have imagined, that she took a closer look at his supposed background, and, being very, very intelligent, everything fell quickly into place.

(Their child, combining the talents and passions of both her parents, would one day become one of the world's top police experts protecting museums from art theft.)

But such was their love for one another that they settled in to a certain detente: He could deal in the very expensive objects as long as he stayed away from the greatest works of the world's common heritage.

If he snatched shiny baubles like rare coins or some supermodel's Tiffany jewelry, his wife could live with it; if he went after the sublime - the Mona Lisa or a Michelangelo - it was over.

Somehow, the Faberge egg fell into a bit of a gray area. He thought it another bauble; she thought it transcendent.

He insisted she hadn't been clear enough until it was too late, that he'd never meant to hurt her and he wouldn't have even thought about it if he'd known.

A bitter argument ensued that just kept getting worse and worse, with her insisting if he'd been able to take the egg, he was able to put it back, and with him insisting that even if he could, he wouldn't, but its whereabouts were now unknown even to him so it was impossible in any case.

It blew out the point where she finally said, Either the egg comes back, or you don't.

So he moved out, thinking it temporary, and then settled into that stubbornness people often do, spending many, many, too many years regretting it, years filled with everything he could possibly want, except the two things he really wanted.

Finally, when he managed to learn the egg had been very secretly resold, he saw his chance to give in, a way he could do so without giving up his honor - he wouldn't be taking it back from the original buyer.

If he could just replace the egg, he was sure he'd be forgiven. He was sure his wife - after all these years she'd never divorced him and even after his "death" had never remarried - wanted to forgive him as much as he wanted to be forgiven. He only needed give her the excuse.

He couldn't believe how many years and how much happiness he'd thrown away for it, how much pain he'd caused. He should have set it right long ago, even before it had been resold. Now, there was nothing holding him back.

Except... there was one thing: Age.

In the intervening years, he'd grown too old to pull off such an elaborate job himself. This one would have been challenge even at his peak.

It was far too involved, required too many people and, and maybe this was another sign of his age, for the first time his thoughts were clouded by the fear of being caught.

No matter how small a chance there might be, it was always there.

(That was part of the juice, of course... which is why the backpack switch is so dumb, because there's so little risk it's hardly a jewel-thief maneuver - Cary Grant would never have swapped a backpack lying on train seat and acted like done anything exceptional.)

If he were to get caught, his fate would be sealed: he'd never see his daughter again, not free, and he wouldn't be able to bear her finally seeing him, after all these years, as a humiliated old man behind bars. He'd waited too long; he had too little time left to make that up to her.


And there was the unresolved question of the love of his life.


That Dutch art curator was one of the few people in the world who knew that the Faberge egg had been stolen.

And she was one of the even fewer who knew when it came back.