‘Ocean’s’ crew is up to its old tricks

Remaking popular films is a dicey proposition. Rarely do the new versions achieve the critical acclaim or box office stature of the originals. Remember the disastrous versions of “Miracle on 34th Street,” “Psycho” and “An Affair to Remember”? But “Ocean’s Eleven,” the 2001 retelling of a 1960 Rat Pack flick, was a rare exception.

With Steven Soderbergh -- fresh from his Oscar win for “Traffic” -- at the helm and featuring a talented cast of some of the most perfect faces in Hollywood, including those of George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, Matt Damon and Andy Garcia, the crime caper comedy vastly improved on the Rat Pack original.

It also cleaned up at the box office, taking in $450.7 million worldwide.

And now Soderbergh, Clooney and company have done something that Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr. and Dean Martin never accomplished -- made a sequel to “Ocean’s.”

Sequels, though, can be even more precarious to pull off than remakes. So the glamorous cast and heavyweight director have a lot riding on “Ocean’s Twelve,” which opens Friday.

Set three years after “Ocean’s Eleven,” the new film finds the thieves scattered around the world trying to live crime-free lives. But when ruthless Las Vegas casino kingpin Terry Benedict (Garcia) finds out that it was Danny Ocean (Clooney) and his gang who robbed his casinos, he demands they return all the money they stole from him or he’ll have them sent to jail. Because they are too hot to handle in America, Ocean and his band travel to Europe to pull enough heists to pay off Benedict.

Joining the group this time around is Oscar winner Catherine Zeta-Jones, who plays a beautiful European cop -- the daughter of a master thief -- who once had an affair with Rusty Ryan (Pitt) and never quite got over it.

-- Susan King