12 Rounds

This was a movie I was really dreading to see. When I went into Leominster last Thursday, it felt like a trip to the dentist. Two hours of mindless tension seemed to await me.

It would have better if I had never seen the trailer for 12 Rounds. It was to be the ole' "ticking clock." Every screenwriter knows the idea---at the climax of a thriller, a bomb is a set to go off. We as the audience know exactly how much time is left for the protagonist to disarm the bomb, or perform some equivalent action, to save the day. Perhaps the most famous such ticking clock was at the end of Goldfinger (1964).

Sometimes the "ticking clock" is one established by an authority figure---a time limit given to the protagonist to solve the problem. "You've got 24 hours to find the killer," yells the police captain to the hot-shot detective. "And then I'm pulling you off the case!"

Sometimes the entire movie is a ticking clock, like 48 Hours (1982).

But 12 Rounds would attempt to outdo all these previous attempts. There is a 24-hour ticking clock (the time given for a New Orleans police officer to rescue his wife from a crazed homicidal terrorist) that is overlain by twelve separate ticking sub-clocks (like defusing a bomb in an impossibly short amount of time).

What a thrill ride of tension awaited me. A half hour into the movie, as the tension-filled part kicked into gear, I wondered how I was going to make it through the whole thing.

But about the mid-point, just as I thought I couldn't take anymore rounds of it, the movie slowed down a tad, and threw a few wrinkles into the story to keep it from being a droning exercise in faux-tension manipulation of our emotions. Eventually I even cared about the characters a little bit.

The story is silly, to be sure, and stretches the ability to believe it, but if you let your imagination run with it, it was fun enough to justify sitting through it.

There were plenty of cliches to keep my tabulating them throughout. Perhaps the most annoying one arrived in one of the early "rounds." When the police officer discovers that his wife is in danger on a ferry boat, he does what every cop in a movie does: he runs to the nearest innocent motorist, then commands him (by the power that police have been granted these days) to surrender his car so that the police officer can then proceed to use it. As every cop does in the circumstance (because it is not his car), he drives in such a way so as to smash up not only the borrowed car, but also about six dozen other cars along the way.

If you and I did that, for whatever reason, we'd go to jail for several decades, but when the loved one of a cop is in danger, the 97th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution allows a cop to smash up entire cities. They ratified it last week.

Later on the same cop borrows a firetruck and proceeds to smash up about six dozen other cars. Actually that part was sort of cool, since it was sort of original and didn't irk me by endorsing the idea that cops have free license to seize our property at will. This last issue is particular thorny in New Orleans, of all places.

Another cliche was the viscious white-faced terrorist (Irish, no less). More war on terror bullshit. I'm so tired of it.

In the Third Act, we finally get a plot twist that made me perk up a little bit, one that forces you reinterpret all the previous "rounds" of the game that the terrorist has been playing. It was nicely foreshadowed at the beginning in several ways, including a scene involving a plumbing leak in the cop's house.

But unfortunately the story really didn't run with this plot twist. It just fizzled out, and the story flopped back into a high-action that involved nothing less than a helicopter explosion (e.g., see this).

In narrative terms, the failure of the story at the end of the movie was because the hero never got the upperhand on the villain. Throughout the entire movie, the hero reacts to moves made by the villain. The aforementioned plot twist could and should have resulted in the hero finally getting the jump on the villain. But he doesn't. Up until the very climax, the hero does nothing but react. This is the mark of an inferior story, but one that could have been fixed.

Did I say the story failed? Yes it did, but not as bad as I thought, and the tension was actually less manipulative than I feared. For a film made by a wrestling entertainment company, it actually wasn't so wretched.