Can you smell what the Cena is cooking?
Director Renny Harlin made Die Hard 2: Die Harder, a movie that followed the Big Action Movie playbook so diligently that it was actually very, very good. (Way better than perhaps it ever deserved to be.) Since then his movies have steadily decreased in quality to the point that a few years ago he made the teen horror classic The Covenant that topped a whopping 3% on the Tomatometer.
How does one follow up that, perhaps retirement? No, in this case you take the helm of a film made by a wrestling company!
12 rounds is mediocre, but not near as bad as it could have been.
Being a WWE film we have that perpetual Oscar candidate John Cena in the lead role, getting his Van-Damme on. Cena is Danny, a New Orleans cop and member of the perfect couple.
Either Miles, Renny or the writer saw Die Hard 3 (With a Vengeance) before this went to production, as the “make the guy race from one ludicrous set up to the next in a diminishing time frame” gimmick was wrung dry then.
You know what is coming, Danny’s missus Molly is kidnapped and Danny must fang around New Orleans in a series of increasingly unbelievable scenes in an attempt to get her back. Will he succeed? I dunno, it didn’t say on the DVD cover.
The kidnapper is Miles Jackson, a generic bad guy terrorist type. He kidnaps Molly after he escapes from prison, where Danny put him 12 months earlier, in the process accidentally killing Miles’ girlie.
There are explosions and car chases but curiously Cena is never shirtless, no chairs are used as weapons and there is not one single throwdown. I wonder if some of the many WWE fans that watch this expecting to see bulging-eyed Cena stalking around with a microphone went away confused and disappointed.
So as mentioned Miles sets Danny 12 challenges, or “rounds” for him to deal with if wants to save Molly.
Why are they called “Rounds”?
No idea, and each task seems very intricate and involved a lot of planning, curious seeing as Miles apparently escaped only the previous day!
One round involves breaking into a bank vault, and then into a locked box in the vault, which by the look of things is ludicrously easy apparently.
This is a mystifying film to me. It has a guy famous for wrestling (he has some sort of charm and screen presence by the way) that doesn’t wrestle, in an action film that screams MA15 potential without any serious violence, major action events or nudity of any form, and is entertaining without ever seeming to try to be bigger than a straight to DVD flick.
I miss the big, dumb action films of the late 80s and 90s where they set low expectations and met them. Nowadays films have delusion of grandeur when they are little more than mediocre, and films are hyped to buggery where they are doomed to disappointment (Watchmen, Transformers anyone?).
Here we have a movie with a ready made WWE fan base screaming for violence and blood and guts, and they get a competent, yet strangely watered down offering like this.
Final Rating – 6.0 / 10. This will not offend no thrill. It won’t exhilarate or disappoint. You won’t regret watching it but you likely won’t talk about it the next day. It just is. Put that on the Special Edition DVD cover WWE films!
