Disappointing weekend gross for Renny Harlin's new action film

12 Rounds roundly panned by New York Times reviewer

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The latest Hollywood action movie release by the Finnish director Renny Harlin, the man behind the camera on the currently-stalled Mannerheim biopic, was not overly well-received on its opening weekend in the United States.
      Harlin's 12 Rounds, distributed by Fox, was only 7th in the weekend's box office results, with a gross of USD 5.3 million. The weekend's big splash was the DreamWorks sci-fi animation Monsters vs. Aliens, which did nearly USD 60 million worth of business.
     
The result for 12 Rounds can be considered only modest, and most of the critical reviews of the movie were negative.
      The New York Times described the picture as "An extremely frantic movie in which nothing of interest happens", and in a snarky reference to the structure of the film the reviewer wrote: "There are, as you may have guessed, 12 rounds of this arbitrary nonsense. Annoying as the conceit may be, it neatly functions as a means to gauge how much is left to endure".
     
The professional journal Variety used one of the more damning adjectives found in the NYT review: "ludicrous".
      Variety also noted that the film's "jittery editing -- combined with the helmer's shaky-cam images, many seen through computer screens or other extraneous frames -- makes the movie very hard to watch".
      The Chicago Tribune took the view that Renny Harlin, if anyone, should be a director capable of hiding professional wrestler John Cena's lack of acting training, as he was the director who made Sylvester Stallone look like a mountain climber in Cliffhanger.
      Nevertheless, the paper described the movie as "an occasionally exciting but always empty experience".
      The reviewer then goes on in a slightly different vein: "But there's news here, and it comes from behind the camera. The Finn isn't finished."
     
     
     
     


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Danish Nordisk Film pulls out of Mannerheim film project (24.2.2009)
  Can a movie about Mannerheim reach an audience of a million? (3.3.2009)

Links:
  12 Rounds on the Internet Movie Database
  Renny Harlin on IMDB

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