Ocean's Twelve: The European Job
The sequel traded the Strip for a Lake Como villa, a Sicilian harbour town and the most famous casino in Europe.
With Terry Benedict's money owed and Las Vegas too hot, the 2004 sequel sent the crew to Europe, and the production genuinely went there. The film shot across Italy and France, and its most memorable address is on Lake Como: Villa Erba in Cernobbio, the 19th century lakeside estate that plays home to François Toulour, the rival gentleman thief known as the Night Fox. The choice had a neighbourly logic to it. George Clooney had bought his own villa a few kilometres up the shore in Laglio two years earlier, and Lake Como has been Hollywood's favourite Italian backdrop since.
Italy, France, Monaco
Rome hosts a chunk of the caper's second act, and the crew's lowest moment plays out in Castellammare del Golfo, a harbour town in Sicily. In Paris the production shot at the Gare du Nord and around the Sorbonne. And the file would not be complete without the establishment that outranks every casino in the world for sheer costume drama: the Casino de Monte-Carlo, the 1863 landmark where the Night Fox's world of tuxedoed thievery has its natural habitat.
The laser dance and the lesson
The sequence everyone remembers is Toulour capoeira-dancing through a moving laser grid to steal a jewelled egg. It is also the film quietly admitting what the first movie proved: the theatrics are the entertainment, and the real game is information. Toulour loses not to a better dancer but to men who knew something he did not, which is the oldest result in gambling. The player with better information about the rules beats the player with better moves. That is the entire reason the fine print gets decoded on this site.
The Faces
