12 Rounds
Release Date:
March 27, 2009
On the Big Board |
| Position |
Staff |
In Brief |
| 165/169 |
Max Braden |
I could see casually leaving this playing on the USA channel if I had nothing else to watch, but it's not worth the rental. |
You have to hand it to John Cena. He has tricked people into watching him using the reverse psychology of the catchphrase, “You can’t see me.” The end result is that they look harder and it makes them overlook the fact that he’s kind of a dink. Despite his stiff, less than athletic performances as a pro wrestler, his personality has allowed him to become a world champion in his sport. He is also in the formative phase of a would-be acting career in Hollywood despite the fact that his first film, The Marine, didn’t even match its $20 million production budget during its theatrical run.
Undeterred by the failure of The Marine, once famous director Renny Harlin has signed up Cena to frontline an action flick called 12 Rounds. The premise here is simple. A shameless nogoodnik has a score to settle with Cena. In order to achieve payback, he has kidnapped the detective’s girlfriend, who looks a lot like Ashley Scott of Birds of Prey and Jericho. Cena is forced to follow the rules of the psycho’s game by finishing a dozen tests of wit and skill in order to attain an inevitable final face-off wherein the villain presumably dies in some harrowing but ironic manner, allowing Cena and Scott to be joined together in steroid-laden, saline-filled matrimony.
The only reason to believe that this might not be formulaic movie-making is the presence of Harlin, but let’s be honest here. The man hasn’t been choosy about his paychecks lately. His films in the 2000s are Driven, the Sylvester Stallone comeback film that prevented Stallone from coming back (what’s Kip Pardue up to these days anyway?); Mindhunters, which is the current BOP record holder for most times pulled off the release schedule (with five, if you’re scoring at home); Exorcist: The Beginning, a movie so bad it got directed twice; The Covenant, the unfortunate early warning signal that Twilight would break out; and Cleaner, a $25 million production that never merited domestic release. What I’m saying here is that if ever a tandem deserved one another, it’s John Cena and Renny Harlin. If you’re smart enough to be reading BOP, you’re plenty smart enough to know what dreck this is going to be. As Cena himself says, you can’t see him. Not in this. You deserve better. (David Mumpower/BOP)
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