12 Rounds - Character Counts | Trash Cinema Club

Jun

10

12 Rounds - Character Counts

≡ Category: Action, Movie Reviews By Country, United States, Worth A Look |
≅ Written by: Michael Kydonieus

Country: United States
Genre: Action
Director: Renny Harlin
Year: 2009

Rating:

WORTH A LOOK

12 Rounds is without a doubt the best WWE movie I’ve ever seen, which is damning with faint praise. It was surely designed as a dumdum action movie for the non-discriminating.

As you would expect from a WWE movie, much of the action is second hand, taken from better movies. The elevator scene is swiped from Speed; the streetcar scene is swiped from the little known Hong Kong action flick Extreme Crisis, and so on. The plot itself is basically ripped off from Die Hard With A Vengeance.

There are many lapses in logic. A scene in which a runaway streetcar is headed for a rendezvous with a crowd goes on for ten minutes or so, but no one thinks to call ahead and warn the crowd, which could have easily been dispersed. In the same scene, the car which is trying to stop the streetcar has it’s back wheels off the ground. I know the car doesn’t have four wheel drive and yet it manages to keep slowing down the trolley. And so on and so forth.

Yet 12 Rounds isn’t painful to sit through. In part, a lot of credit has to go to director Renny Harlin (Cliffhanger, Die Hard 2, Deep Blue Sea, The Long Kiss Goodnight), a first class action director who has clearly come down in the world if he’s reduced to directing movies starring WWE wrestlers. Harlin directs action very well and the filmmaking in general here is slick and professional. That counts for a lot.

And, along the way, we get to enjoy lots of things blowing up and the usual assorted vehicular mayhem. It was also nice to check out post Katrina New Orleans, especially the 9th Ward. Fresh locations never hurt.

But what really saves 12 Rounds is the character writing and the lead performances, of all things. Danny Fisher (John Cena), the simple (but not stupid) New Orleans policeman at the center of the story, is a fully realized character, not the usual bulletproof cipher. He’s big like a refrigerator, but he has a gentle soul. When his fiancee scolds him, he looks like he’s going to cry. At many points during the story, he doubts himself. I found myself rooting for Danny Fisher, which is a major accomplishment for the filmmakers. Likewise, his fiancee, Molly Porter (Ashley Scott), has a lot of personality and is quite appealing. For the villain, terrorist Miles Jackson, actor Aidan Gillen made some interesting decisions. He makes Miles a quiet-spoken Irishman with a dry sense of humor. Again, this isn’t by the numbers character writing.

Even when we roll our eyes at holes in the plot or unrealistic sequences, the characters make us want to overlook the deficiencies of the script and the lack of originality in the situations. In the end, it isn’t quite possible to do that, but the characters keep 12 Rounds from being an out and out failure.