About the only thing Steven Soderbergh has going for him in “Ocean’s Twelve”, a dull smear of contract fulfillment, is David Holmes’ rousing score. The scenes that contain a scintilla of life—and there are only a handful—come courtesy of Holmes, who scored the original as well. The music enlivens the action with sophistication and panache, exactly what the rest of the film exists to deliver on but doesn’t. There are literally a dozen scenes in this film that would sink like stones in a river without the swift current of Holmes’ snappy, kinetic rhythms.

As for the rest of this disappointing affair, George Clooney and his colleagues sleepwalk their way through a script that’s like a house of cards on a Chicago rooftop. “Twists” occur with a perfunctory casualness that kills any suspense. One of the gang’s in a jam?  Wait a scene for the predicament to fizzle out weakly. Is a character looking like he or she might betray the others?  Wait until his or her backstory is revealed, offering the thread to unravel the tension completely. Half of the film, which mocks the audience with banality, seems to exist merely set up the other half, which mocks it with preposterousness.

The entire final segment, in which Ocean’s gang is picked up by the police, exists only for the visual joke of having them all ending up, one by one, in what is apparently the only jail in Italy. The talented Soderbergh fails to sparkle in this movie because at heart he is far more experimental than the project he’s chosen. Lately he seems more interested in his Hollywood pals than good scripts.

Indeed, the one glimpse of inspiration is a postmodern joke played to the hilt in a clever sequence involving “Julia Roberts” and a game Bruce Willis. Otherwise the wasted cast members play it all so cool they slip into a zone of indifference. Clooney seems smarter than his lines; Matt Damon earnestly flubs his only attractive quality, earnestness; and Pitt’s pothead in “True Romance” was more aware of his surroundings than the dope he plays here. Casey Affleck and Scott Caan, who stole the first film, are almost nonexistent.

Perhaps the real joke is that the movie’s greatest theft is onscreen: moviegoers are paying for George Clooney’s European Vacation. Hope he got in some good pranks while he was abroad—other than “Ocean’s Twelve”, I mean.