From the continuing case files of studly HBO actors in thankless movie roles: Aidan Gillen of "The Wire" as the unstoppable criminal mastermind in 12 Rounds.
With that update out of the way — you're welcome — let's move on to serious business. It's come to my attention that when you work out of your living room, it's much harder to convince the office that the mild cold you have is actually a crippling illness that will require you to abdicate your responsibilities for the next week in favor of watching your roommate play zombie video games. (He just killed a chainsaw-juggling clown. It was pretty sweet.)
I'm sorry, I'm going to have to cut this short; we just found the sniper rifle. I just wanted you all to know that despite a running nose, I did my job this weekend. I think the Nobel committee's in Stockholm. My name's Ed.
In the New Orleans of 12 Rounds, the FBI are on the verge of putting away notorious arms dealer Aidan Gillen. Local cop John Cena is the man who runs him down, but in the chase, Gillen’s girlfriend dies in an accident.
It’s a year later. Gillen has broken out of prison. Blaming Cena for the loss of his love, he kidnaps Cena's girlfriend Ashley Scott and sets up a deadly game: survive 12 rounds of puzzles and traps, and he wins her back. Fail, and she dies.
12 Rounds pairs veteran director Renny Harlin with first-time screenwriter Daniel Kunka. For the first few minutes, it appears to be a solid match. With confident storytelling and flavorful dialogue, they set the tone for a winning thriller.
Then the remaining 98 minutes of movie happen.
The first big warning light goes off when the last thing Cena and Scott do before she’s kidnapped is have a fight. If you were making an old-timey treasure map of the plot, that’s where you’d mark “HERE THERE BE CHEAP DRAMA.”
The waters soon grow dark with schools of hungry cliches. Let's set aside, for a moment, the concept of the criminal mastermind who forces his cop rival into a series of comically improbable tasks, like a game of Mousetrap where your girlfriend dies at the end. This has never, ever happened in the history of police or murder, but it's the foundation for an entire genre of movies and books, so we'll just have to wait until it dies a quiet death like musicals and westerns.
While we're busy waiting on that, 12 Rounds blesses us with one more case of a good cop coerced into tear-assing around town with increasingly reckless abandon. When Cena's not saving innocent lives (in admittedly decent action sequences), he's dealing with the FBI (there's a good agent and a bad agent) and solving Gillen's crazy puzzles just in the nick of time.
By the fifth or sixth round, it even feels tired of itself, compressing rounds or skipping them altogether. Locked down by its own gimmick, it's got no time for anything that doesn't involve running towards a bomb or away from the explosion.
A tacked-on late-hour twist tries to absolve it of this — see, it's really not a "diabolical madman takes personal revenge"-thriller — but that's just trying to have its cake and eat it too. 12 Rounds moves at breakneck speed through a story we've heard a hundred times before.
Grade: C