12 Rounds (2009)

The year is 2009. Renny Harlin, a director who once hurled sharks at a helicopter, takes the reins of a WWE Studios production starring John Cena, and the result is a film in which a New Orleans detective must complete twelve elaborate tasks to rescue his kidnapped girlfriend from an arms dealer. There is a runaway trolley. There is a free-falling elevator. There is a bomb strapped to a woman's chest. The plot is borrowed wholesale from Die Hard with a Vengeance, a fact critics noted at the time with the weary resignation of men who have seen this before.

What the film does not contain is any discernible engagement with the social questions of its moment, or of ours. The cast is largely white, the women exist to be imperiled, and the villain's scheme involves robbing a mint, which the screenplay treats as ordinary larceny instead of a critique of late capitalism. No character wrestles with identity. Nobody lectures. The film has no interest in the environment, in neurodiversity, in the body, or in history, revisionist or otherwise.

This is not a failing, exactly. It is a classification. The film belongs to a tradition of action cinema that asks nothing of its audience beyond a tolerance for explosions and a willingness to accept that a police detective can survive a fall from a moving fire truck. Nathan Rabin of The A.V. Club called it honest trash, and the phrase holds up. It never pretends to be anything else. There is something almost restful about a movie so untroubled by the cultural moment, a relic of a time when a man could punch a villain on a helicopter and call it a day. We score it accordingly. Zero across the board, and no thematic tags of any kind. It is a film about a man, a woman in peril, and twelve rounds of nonsense. The sommelier sets down the glass. No notes.

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