Column:

'12 Rounds' is far too many

This is an example of a big, dumb action movie that doesn't work.

By Dan Moore

Published April 9, 2009

It is one thing to release a big, dumb action movie -- there are a lot of them, and some of them are entertaining -- it's another thing entirely to be so derivative, so absolutely devoid of new ideas, that there is no theatrical reason for the movie to be made. "12 Rounds," the latest disaster from the film arm of World Wrestling Entertainment, is that movie: Every wronged-man action film you've ever seen, written as though the script were the result of someone trying to remember how "Die Hard" went. John Cena, previously of "The Marine," is the wrestler getting the proverbial push this time, and to the WWE's credit this is probably the perfect vehicle for their top good-guy champ. It's a basic "Die Hard" derivative: a cop captures a dangerous terrorist, who then escapes, kidnaps the cop's wife, and, in an inexplicable twist, challenges him to a deadly series of games for his wife's life. Famously stiff even as professional wrestlers go, here Cena, playing the wronged detective, needs only to banter perfunctorily with his comic-relief partner and stare dreamily at his unlucky wife. If the material were better, the film would stand out as an excellent job of masking Cena's limitations.

But the material is terrible. All the stock characters -- the renegade cop, the beloved wife, the maniacal terrorist -- seem to be operating without a full deck of cards. Everybody is dumb, even by action movie standards, which is difficult to work through when the plot revolves around a maniacal genius criminal who's organizing what everyone in the film agrees are vast, brilliant illicit enterprises. The screenwriter, first-timer Daniel Kunka, would have been well advised to follow the classic creative writing dictum and write what he knows, whatever that is, because it's not ingenious criminal plots.

Making matters worse is the direction of veteran mediocre Renny Harlin, who is still coasting on "Cliffhanger," which is going on 16 years old. Since then Harlin has directed such classics as "Deep Blue Sea" and "Driven," and here he shows his usual skill for muddling action scenes into incomprehensibility. Cena does some absurd things here -- surviving explosions, jumping gaps that Super Mario would walk around, driving an old Mustang like he's a NASCAR vet -- but you wouldn't know it from Harlin's direction, which takes the shaky-cam trope to absurd lengths. In most of the action scenes the cameraman seems about one false move from tripping over himself and falling to the ground, which still -- after years of bad directors leaning on the idea -- has yet to make a single action scene in the history of film more exciting.

To recap, this is a bad movie, directed badly, starring a non-actor and written in a way that manages to ape nearly every post-"Die Hard" action success story without getting a single imitation right. There have been worse films -- lots of them -- but few have seemed so completely unnecessary as "12 Rounds."