Simply A Masterpiece

Great Film overall

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

This film had no potential. The plot was overused. Kind of felt like a Taken vibe to it. No good performances. Cheap villain. Cheap ending. Nothing much good to this movie. I will say it has a good few scenes. But it was clichéd. Predictable. With nothing for a script.World Wrestling Entertainment really overdid this trilogy. Making 2 garbage sequels (Being worse than this)Slight pros for the film. There are a few scenes that make you feel thrilled at a brief moment. So it is not a 1 star worthy film. But all and all 3/10. Waste of a film.

I will admit to begin with I have been a big WWE fan for years since I was a young kid. However, I am not such a big fan of the WWE studios films including 12 rounds. This film goes with the story of John Cena's character going through 12 rounds of insane challenges to rescue his wife from an Irish terrorist from his past. Now this film will be compared to Cena's first film The Marine which in my opinion is a lot worse than this and Cena is so much better in this film in every way. He is relatable to the situation and he is dynamic with his performance, however, this film is the villain Miles Jackson (Aidan Gillen) he steals every scene he is in and he makes the viewer just hate this character and want Cena to prevail. There are a few other characters but this really is the battle between Cena and Gillen which gives this film its intensity. The main negatives of this film is that most of the rounds that Cena participates in is ridiculous in a grounded reality which takes the viewer out of the film. This film is a good piece of fun with explosions and gunfights but it lacks a bit of depth with the characters apart from Cena and Gillen everybody else is quiet boring and this film ends up just being okay instead of great.

I praise this movie! Creative concept and unpredictable until the very end. I was duly entertained. Yes it's a rather shallow film with underdeveloped characters and the most linear storytelling I have seen in a while and normally films can suffer when this is the case but Renny Harlin gets away with it. Not only on par with the standards for the genre i would say, but he does it in a very convincing way too.It works because the film flows with a continuously high pace and has a clear focus on the strong points: the action and the story. No time to slow down and deliver speeches, check the backgrounds for moral decisions, delve to deeply into emotions etc. There's no hidden ambition from the director to make us redefine ourselves or the world we live in. When people watch cartoons they have no problems taking it for what it is and i think this is also the right frame of mind for this movie.The center of this piece are of course the action scenes which are impeccable, made the old school way without tiresome CGI:s. The acting is not great but it definitely doesn't take anything away from the film either. Obviously there wasn't much of a heavy script to work with anyway, but the scarce dialog serves its purpose not to disrupt the pace and the flow.The problems John Cenas character is forced to solve to save his girl reminded me somewhat of the skills of McGyver and that of course is not a bad thing! I also particularly liked the villain played by Aidan Gillen. With a 22 million dollar budget i think Renny Harlin made the best possible movie he could have done for that amount of money. I could mention many films with a considerably larger budget being worse in several aspects. Therefor i give 7.5/10. In my world this is the maximum rating for this kind of popcorn action.In an entertainment industry burden with CGI and self-appointed reformers of the world, we should all pay our respect to Harlins obvious craftsmanship and old school techniques in putting action on photographic emulsion and his obvious reluctance to be anything else than entertainment. Pop the popcorn and let the action begin!

If you're going to watch this movie, it will be to see vehicles crash into other vehicles and cause lots of damage. This movie does that very well. It will also be for the nonstop excitement in a number of scenes, including the thrilling runaway streetcar. And the suspense of wondering if Det. Fisher can complete each challenge in time, breaking all the rules along the way. He has so many challenges and each one just leads to another one, equally impossible.Sure, we've seen this sort of thing before, but if I enjoy the formula, so what?But this movie isn't without problems. Aidan Gillen didn't quite reach the point of being deliciously evil, though the potential was there and he achieved what I hoped for in a few scenes.And some of the writing was pretty bad. Cops are supposed to be smarter than this. FBI agents are supposed to be smarter too. One of the movie's final scenes had some of the most pathetic writing imaginable. But that's just the dialogue. The action in that scene was great.I was disappointed to see Steve Harris from the critically acclaimed "Awake" in this. He didn't add much. And by the way, that's not him asleep in that streetcar. I couldn't understand what he was doing there, given the urgency of the situation.With all the killing that takes place, the violence isn't graphic. You know people die, but you don't see the blood.I particularly liked scenes with Danny and Molly together when not trying to stay alive. One highlight is Molly trying to repair the plumbing and I'm not talking about her mechanical skills. These scenes had some funny lines, and as terrible as certain events were, the movie's last line was really funny.It was ... interesting.