This is an action movie for those of you who don't watch action films a lot. Or perhaps for those of you whom just like watching a fire truck run into cars for about 10 minutes straight. Either way, "12 Rounds" isn't all that good and could have been titled "12 Action Movie Ripoffs In One".
It's not like I had the highest expectations from this movie. Seriously, its a John Cena movie. It's made by WWE films. Was I expecting brilliance? No. But I was expecting it to be somewhat original and I definitely didn't get that.
I think that Renny Harlin was trying to make a statement: 'See! I could have directed "Die Hard With A Vengeance" too!' because the majority of this film rips on that concept. Foreign terrorist/genius takes on blue collar cop in big city to make him go through a series of ridiculous tasks so that he could take revenge/steal shit. Wow. Really? That's pretty much word for word conceptionally. What makes these two films different is that "Die Hard III" was actually fun to watch and this was just sad. I had nothing of any sort of feelings towards Mr Fisher (Cena) or his girlfriend, whom steals the show with her awful acting. And with an unmemorable villiain whom looks like a Richard Gere "The Jackal" rip-off, this one tops the charts with stolen ideas.
On the plus side, the pacing of the film is pretty good and some of the action sequences were solid...although I could have used a bit actually gun fighting as most of this film is based on that 'run Hero run!' concept of action. Let's make cars go boom and buildings go boom and elevators go boom and helicopters go boom and girlfriends go boom and even for one scene water go boom. So even the action is a bit repetitive for an film like this.
Maybe I was expecting a bit much from a film like this. I mean, originality? Nobody does that anymore anyway. And "12 Rounds" verifies this idea. Shit, it doesn't even trust the audience to remember its story for the duration of the film (how many flashbacks of the girlfriend's face do we need to remind us why he's doing all of this?) so why would I expect it to be original. Only for Cena fans.
Written By Matt Reifschneider
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