12A, 125 mins

HOW many remakes does it take to change a lightbulb? Judging by the indecent amount of fun Steven Soderbergh has cranked from Lewis Milestone’s Ocean’s Eleven, you might want to break out the candles.

Ocean’s Twelve is the second time Soderbergh (see interview) has rewired this 1960 Rat Pack caper, and the loving, lucrative, and actually quite careless way he has assembled it suggests that he might be mad enough to attempt a dozen more.

To call Ocean’s Twelve a sequel is far too flattering. Three-and-a-half years have passed, and the action has shifted to Europe. But the same glossy conmen, led by George Clooney and Brad Pitt, talk the same incomprehensible tripe on their way to another dismally complicated heist.

The glittering compensation is the astonishing line-up of Hollywood celebrity at total ease with a director fêted for his cutting-edge style. Personally, I like a little more pain with my art, and screen chemistry that doesn’t look as if it has been inspired by whoopee cushions. With such a crowded catwalk, perhaps that is too much to ask. The joshing and jostling of stars is the comic glue. The result is thumbnail sketches so fleeting you wonder why half the models bothered turning up.

The Chinese acrobat, Yen, has precisely no lines, or indeed duties, apart from bouncing on a hotel bed and climbing into a suitcase with several bags of crisps.

The drama is relatively simple. Someone has ratted on the rat pack. They have two weeks to repay the $160 million (plus interest) they stole from casino boss Andy Garcia in Ocean’s Eleven or their kidneys will be kebabbed and served on toast.

We know Garcia means business because he swaggers into saunas across the globe chewing a half-smoked cigar and tells each of them in person. He wears a putter in one hand and a large goon in the other. He is one crazy golfer.

Terrified of his trick shots, they gather in Amsterdam to rob a local Scrooge of his vintage bonds, only to discover they’ve been set up by their contact (Robbie Coltrane). In fact, it looks as if they’ve been stitched up all over Europe: Rome, Lake Como, Sicily and Monte Carlo. Eventually they wind up in Paris in a “who is the best thief?” competition with a French aristocrat, Vincent Cassel.

At this exhausting juncture, it’s a baffling scrap to win as much air time as possible. Clooney’s smooth-as-custard hero, Danny Ocean, is the outright winner, followed by Pitt, who chomps his way through every scene as if “impro” eating was the new sunglasses. Matt Damon seeks to disguise his lack of clout by raising in-joke “leadership issues”. And Julia Roberts arrives in the last reel like someone who has a reserved parking space. In an exquisitely awful life/art moment she pretends to play her real-life self visiting a French museum to nick a Fabergé egg. Bruce Willis is mad enough to tag along under his own steam.

Soderbergh has an alarming appetite for these Pirandello moments. I wish he spent more time injecting sense into his script. The director is so enamoured of tracking shots of glassy interiors, taxis and egos that he frequently mislays the thrills.

Inspector Poirot would be confounded by his raison d’être. Cue Catherine Zeta-Jones, a super-cop in ankle-breaking high heels who has a professional interest in putting the audience in the picture and the entire cast behind bars. The shapely frisson is her almost sexual desire to succeed. Could this be why she won the No 12 shirt? Cynics will doubtless say she’s got an old soft spot for Brad Pitt that usefully replaces the spot Roberts once had for George (they’re happily married in Ocean’s Twelve). I suspect the real answer is that Zeta-Jones is too glamorous to be squeezed into a margin and too famous to be left out of the team. But we might have to wait until the release of Ocean’s Thirteen for the honest answer to that one.

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