12 Rounds (2009)
Release Date: April 26, 2009
A dreaded criminal mastermind has broken
out of prison after being behind bars for a year. During that time, he’s stewed
in his feelings of hatred and rage towards those who ruined his life, driving
him to terrotise the city upon his escape. Only a WWE superstar can save the
day…
Some of the skills needed for
professional wrestling, such as the ability to put on a good show or react to
what your colleagues are doing, lend themselves well to acting, so it’s not
uncommon for wrestlers to try their hand at acting in films and TV shows. 12 Rounds sees John Cena take a stab at
stepping outside the ring, but does his film win the Royal Rumble, or get KOed
by a submission hold?
Miles Jackson, international arms dealer
and the only Irish terrorist in fiction not affiliated with the IRA, is about
to be caught red handed, but the informant confesses to Miles at the last
moment that he’s wearing a wire, so Miles and his girlfriend do a runner. The
police are fired upon by Miles’ henchmen and have to deal with them, while
officer John Cena chases Miles on foot. To his credit, he’s able to keep up
despite Miles having a car by re-enacting the chase from the end of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, minus the bit
where Ferris Bueller falls through the air in slow motion while everyone else
moves at normal speed. When John Cena catches up to the car, Miles’ girlfriend
gets out and flees on foot, only to get intimately acquainted with the road
surface almost immediately thanks to not looking before she crossed. Miles
gives himself up, but he swears that one day, he will get his revenge on John
Cena.
That day comes a year later, just as
John Cena is thinking about settling down with his girlfriend. Miles engineers
a prison riot to cover his escape, then upon getting out he blows up John
Cena’s house (You’ll be glad to hear his dog is safe because it ran outside
when John Cena did. Unfortunately, the plumber who was in the house at the same
time wasn’t so lucky.)
John Cena’s girlfriend was going on
holiday on a boat at the same time, but she gets kidnapped by Miles, who was
also on the boat. He then contacts John Cena to tell him his girlfriend has
been captured and Miles will take what John Cena took from him – unless John
Cena plays 12 Rounds. I always get so excited when they say the title of a movie in the movie!
Miles gives John Cena 12 challenges. If
he beats them all, he gets his lady friend back. If not, she dies, and then a
lot of other people die when the city goes boom. So far, so Die Hard with a Vengeance. Rounds 1 and
2 have already been. Round 3 is to figure out where to go next, which ends up
being the scene of a fire. Round 4 is to brave the fire to find two boxes with
clues to the next round. John Cena does that, only to find out that one of the
boxes is a bomb! Round 5 is to get the boxes somewhere safe then figure out
which is the clue and which is the bomb, which proves easy enough since one of
them is ticking and the other isn’t.
Round 6 takes the form of a trap. John
Cena is lured to a hotel lift with a security guard when Miles announces that
the lift will fall in one minute and they have to decide which of them will be
saved. John Cena escapes with time to spare, but he is unable to save the
security guard despite his best efforts. Round 7 involves John Cena’s
girlfriend on a bus wearing a suicide bomb vest and Miles has the detonator.
John Cena wins by calling Miles’ bluff: since he’s on the bus with them, if the
bomb goes off he dies too. For Round 8, John Cena is given a list of phone
numbers to call. One is safe, the rest will all activate a bomb attached to a
runaway train, and he has one minute to figure out the correct number. He
fails, and Round 9 is to stop the train before it runs over a carnival. While
this has been going on, John Cena’s colleague has been chasing after Miles’
accomplice for Round 10, only for Miles to blow both him and the accomplice up
with yet another bomb for Round 11.
At this point, John Cena is about ready
to give up, but he gets a second wind when it’s proven to him that Miles
cheated for several of the rounds. He ended Round 6 before the minute was up
because John Cena was about to save the security guard, and Round 8 had no safe
number, they would all activate the runaway train. John Cena also figures out
that all the rounds have been part of an elaborate bank heist. Miles has been
using John Cena as an unwitting accomplice and running the police ragged all
over the city at the same time, giving him as much time as he needs to steal
millions in out of circulation bank notes. Instead of going to the graveyard
for the official Round 12, John Cena heads to the hospital, where Miles is
getting into his escape helicopter. John Cena blows up the chopper, landing
safely with his girlfriend in a rooftop swimming pool, along with the stolen
fortune. Happy ending, right? Not really when you consider that since their
house blew up, they’re homeless now, and they can’t use the money to buy a new
house because even if it hadn’t been ruined by the explosion or water, it’s out
of circulation and therefore cannot be spent. At least they still have each
other, John Cena muses while mentally calculating how much overtime he’s earned
today.
It’s surprising how quickly the film
writes itself into a corner thanks to its concept. The 12 Rounds of the title
don’t work all that well, as about half of them are wasted on trivial minor
tasks, or combined. The first two are also done before the game officially
begins. It’s as if the film realised that 12 distinct challenges in a 90 minute
film was too ambitious, especially when the challenges don’t start until 30
minutes in, but instead of trying to resolve the problem, it half-asses the
challenges. The format would have probably worked better as a TV show or video
game, as each challenge could then have an episode or level dedicated to it.
With the gimmick being unable to achieve
its potential, it doesn’t help that this is not a particularly original film,
and a lot of what it riffs on has been done better elsewhere. As stated
earlier, the main plot owes a big debt to Die
Hard with a Vengeance, with a dash of Saw. There’s a sequence involving runaway public
transport, a la Speed. The European
accented villain and obstructive by-the-book law enforcement are action genre
clichés. The love interests of both the hero and villain are plot devices as
opposed to characters. An idea I had while watching to make it stand out a bit
more was a twist inspired by Greek mythology. The 12 Rounds reminded me of the
12 labours of Hercules, which lead me to think of the three central characters
as descendants of the three figures of the story of Persephone. John Cena’s
girlfriend is a descendant of Persephone, abducted by Hades against her will.
Miles Jackson is a descendant of Hades and a kidnapper. John Cena is a
descendant of Zeus, who forced Hades to return Persephone, and just as Hades
tricked Persephone into eating pomegranate seeds that forced her to return to
the Underworld for a period of time every year, I was expecting some kind of
twist involving John Cena’s girlfriend. It didn’t happen, though I did get a
bit excited when it could be seen briefly that the next stop of the bus in
Round 7 was Elysium Fields, the Greek afterlife for the descendants and
champions of the gods. Such a twist could have easily been really lame, but it
would have been unique.
On the plus side, John Cena is likeable
enough as the protagonist. To his credit, he doesn’t imitate another action
hero’s shtick, instead being one to think on his feet and being clever enough
to solve Miles’ riddles. He is portrayed as being sensitive and empathetic, and
even expressing doubt in his own abilities and whether he should carry on with
his quest when innocent people are killed. It’s just as well that he gets some
degree of depth, as he has to carry the film himself for the most part, and the
other characters are stock archetypes.
After a decent start, it’s disappointing
to see 12 Rounds fail to make the
most of its intriguing premise, despite John Cena’s best efforts to make it
somewhat watchable. Tap out.
5/10
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