The star-studded cast is back for another caper in Ocean’s Twelve (12A, seen at Dundee UGC) and thankfully director Steven Soderbergh is too.

Three years after ripping off casino owner Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia) in Las Vegas, Danny Ocean (George Clooney) and his gang have settled down.

That is until Benedict tracks them down and demands his $160 million back — plus interest. The gang have two weeks to come up with the cash.

It’s perhaps unfair to criticise this sort of film for plot holes, after all Ocean’s Eleven was more about the camaraderie of the gang than plausibility and character arcs.

Yes, Benedict got the money back on insurance, but he wants double indemnity. And because he struts about carrying a golf putter he’s so scary the gang decide to steal more cash instead of disappearing with their millions.

Unlike Eleven when the heist went pretty much to plan, in Twelve the gang aren’t so lucky and are failing to make their target. Mind you, with overheads like lifting a house so that an archery shot at a safe can be made through a window, how can they ever expect to make a profit?

Especially when the object they were looking for — the world’s first share certificate — has already been stolen by the Night Fox, another thief.

Second major implausibility coming up. The Night Fox (Vincent Cassel) wants to prove that he is the best thief in the world so he and Ocean’s gang go after the same prize — a priceless Faberge egg. If Ocean wins, his debt to Benedict will be paid.

The gang have to overcome The Night Fox and detective Isabel Lahiri (Catherine Zeta-Jones), who is a former girlfriend of Rusty’s (Brad Pitt), to get to the prize.

New additions Cassel and Zeta-Jones really help the film. They are much more threatening foes than Benedict, who relies on muscle and power rather than brains.

And while the plot is pure nonsense, the film is a lot of fun. The chemistry in the gang is still there and it shows up on screen, though the banter can get a bit self-indulgent at times.

Clooney is excellent as the unflappable smooth operator, but this is more Pitt’s film as he comes to terms with his ex being on his trail.

Julia Roberts is back too — but the less said about her role in the final heist the better. It’s the one note of the film that just feels absolutely and utterly wrong.

There’s nothing wrong with a light- hearted entertaining romp, but it’s a shame that Soderbergh felt the need to come back for a sequel.

Before the film was made he said that he was doing it so that Section Eight, his production company with Clooney, could afford to make more ambitious films.

But he’s also on record as saying he wasn’t proud of Ocean’s Eleven and this is no better so ultimately the only point of this sequel is for an easy pay day all round.

As a director of films like Out of Sight and Traffic he’s much better than this and you can almost sense his boredom as he goes for series of unnecessary zoom shots and coloured filters. Hopefully he’ll report back to work again soon.

VERDICT: A stylish, entertaining film but not one you’re likely to remember much about afterwards. Twelve is no Eleven.

Three stars

Not that Carpenter’s movie wasn’t itself a bit of a steal — he’d borrowed heavily from the Howard Hawks western Rio Bravo (1959), which had John Wayne and a motley band of law-men babysitting a senior baddie in a jail, while black- hatted flunkies hurled themselves at the brickwork in a bid to liberate him.

Truth is, this set-up’s worn-out bones, in slightly different guises, have been trudging round and round the block since the Greeks tried to bust Helen out of Troy, 3000 years ago.

That said, the new Assault is an enjoyable action thriller, with its familiar plotting attracting only a few minus points.

This time, the walls under siege are in contemporary Detroit.

Late on a snowy Hogmanay, uniformed police sergeant Jake Roenick (Ethan Hawke) is overseeing the mothballing of his antiquated precinct house, which sits in an isolated industrial area of the city.

There’s only a few other cops left in the building. Chiefly old-school veteran Jasper (Brian Dennehy) and secretary Iris (Drea de Matteo).

Also visiting is Jake’s shrink, Alex (Maria Bello), because he’s no ordinary desk sarge. He was an undercover narcotics detective, but when an operation went down wrong, and two of his fellow cops got killed, Jake ended up with a lot of mental baggage and requested easier duties. Hence the scheduled therapy session, even though it is New Year’s Eve.

As the bells mark midnight, the assembled few get in the party spirit, but soon the arrival of a tall, dark stranger changes the mood.

Recently-arrested top gangster and cop killer Marion Bishop (Laurence Fishburne) and a few other low-grade crims are getting transported cross-city to the state penitentiary, but when a major blizzard hits Detroit and makes travel almost impossible, their prison bus is re-routed to Precinct 13 for an overnight stay.

The trouble is, the diversion has been engineered by dark forces and, in no time, the remote precinct house is under siege by masked men with the tiny garrison facing a storm of fire-power. Soon Jake is having to draw on old skills and dormant reserves to keep the enemy at bay and is forced to consider freeing and arming his prisoners if any of them are to survive until dawn.

Of the two Assault movies, Carpenter’s wins hands down. It shocks almost from the start (the shooting of a young girl at an ice cream van), it has a fantastic sense of escalating menace, and also nurtures an enigma at its heart — the besieging forces are the teeming and mostly anonymous members of a strange, multi-ethnic street gang, whose motive for attacking the precinct house with such ferocity is never made fully clear, and who end up fading away into the night as mysteriously as they arrive.

The identities of the new film’s assaulting forces are, relatively, more mundane, as are their motives.

And made in pre-mobile phone days, it was also easier to believe Carpenter’s precinct building could have been placed incommunicado by the attackers.

With the new film, the blizzard and a New Year shutdown just about do the trick of explaining away why the outpost’s predicament goes unnoticed, but still the script has to resort to some quasi-scientific nonsense to explain why cell phones don’t work and the cavalry can’t be called.

However, Precinct The Younger does have the edge on its no-name-cast predecessor, in terms of actors. Hawke is always highly watchable and Fishburne brings the same powerful presence to the feast as he did to the Matrix movies. The minor league players, too, are top-notch with the too-seldom-seen-these-days Dennehy outstanding and Gabriel Byrne and John Leguizamo adding clout in other roles.

The location is also atmospherically claustrophobic and the action frequent and explosive.

But can you answer me one burning question? Why do American cops of Irish descent all still have strong Irish accents, even though their great, great, great, great granddaddies emigrated from the Emerald Isle in 1846 and have been in the States and steeped in Yankee talk ever since? That’s the enigma this film nurtures at its heart.

VERDICT: An assault on a classic, but still plenty gripping.

Three stars

THE follow up to Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise was last year’s most unexpected sequel. Early 90s indie-hit Before Sunset saw Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy meet on a train and explore after-hours Vienna for just one day.

The film left it uncertain as to whether the lovers would meet again in six months’ time as they arranged. Before Sunrise answers this question as the two meet nine years later in Paris and find that the chemistry they felt before is still there.

Like Sunset, the film does not feature any action, simply consisting of the pair musing about life and love. The actors have great chemistry and their relationship feels very natural. But Sunrise is a more ambitious film as it more or less unfolds in real time and Linklater makes the most of the Paris location.

EXTRAS: Considering the film itself is pretty short at 77 minutes, you might expect some juicy extras. Sadly not. Just a short on the set doc and a trailer.

VERDICT: An off-beat romantic comedy that’s perfect for Valentine’s Day.

Four stars

Columbia Tristar haven’t skimped on extras on the disk though. As well as a commentary by director Rowdy Herrington and Guest Prof Richard Brown, there are deleted scenes, a making-of doc and five featurettes looking at the legacy of Bobby Jones. Sure to be a must for golf fans, it is priced at £19.99.

Warner Home Video have announced a couple of exciting releases in America, that are sure to make their way to these shores before too long. Firstly a boxset of Controversial Classics is to be released on May 10, claiming to feature films that tackle touchy subjects, such as race, homosexuality, violence and corruption.

The films in the 7-DVD boxset are: I Am A Fugative From a Chain Gang, Fury, Bad Day at Black Rock, Blackboard Jungle, A Face In The Crowd, Advise and Consent and The Americanization of Emily.

The restored version of Samuel Fuller’s classic anti-war movie The Big Red One comes out in America on May 3 in a double-disk DVD.

Originally butchered by the studio on its release in 1980, over 40 minutes has been added to the film, restoring it to the director’s vision.

I saw this restored film at last year’s Edinburgh Film Festival and it’s sensational.

Hopefully these two DVDs will come out in the UK this summer.