Twelve (Review)

So, let us go back to our toddler years. You are being laid down to bed. You look up with a puppy dog face: “Daddy, tell me a story.” Your father smiles back and says “Of course. Have I told you the one about the rich white kids on drugs?” Oh, have I mentioned your father is Kiefer Sutherland? He then proceeds to tell you the bedtime story from hell.

This is essentially the experience when one watches Joel Schumacher’s Twelve. Kiefer Sutherland provides endless, needlessly poetic narration throughout to the point it becomes excessive. Who am I kidding? It’s excessive four minutes in. Here is a movie where the screenwriter felt it was easier to have the narration explain the emotions of the characters than to use dialogue or… acting. He would rather write the narration “Mike is feeling sad now” than have Mike cry.

Twelve is the story of a bunch of rich white kids who party and do drugs in Manhattan. That’s as deep as it gets. This is a premise that could go somewhere interesting and important, but it never goes deep enough. It thinks simply showing you images of various events is enough to get you interested. You think you’re about to dive in the deep end, but it turns out to be as shallow as the kiddie pool. We meet White Mike (Chace Crawford of Gossip Girl), a drug dealer who caters to all the boarding school kids when they come back home. What’s the tweest? He’s completely sober. Sutherland recites the name “White Mike” every other sentence, just to make sure we know his name.

Other than that, I don’t know too many other names without the help of Wikipedia. Characters come and go at will so that we never get to know any of them beyond what Sutherland tells us. Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson is White Mike’s superior in the drug dealing enterprise, but continues to prove he probably should leave the acting thing alone. Rory Culkin (who is a better actor than Macaulay) plays Chris, who uses his house to host a party for Sara Ludlow on her birthday so that she might lose his virginity to her. Sara Ludlow is described early on by Sutherland as the hottest girl in school, one of the many passages of narration that leads to unintentional laughs. Later on he describes Chris’ anticipation of his encounter with Sara, where Sutherland goes on a rant of obscenity and filthy terms for sex. That must have been the hundredth take; no man could read those lines and keep a straight face.

Among the other characters we have Jessica, who spends a lot of the film in the midst of a drug trip where she recites the Gettysburg Address and later talks to her stuffed animals while rolling around in her underwear. Claude is Chris’ older brother who comes home out of rehab and exists just to go nuts. At one point we meet Tobias, the “hot male model” as Sutherland tells us. No fan of Arrested Development could take such a character seriously. There is also Mike’s cousin Molly, played by ex-Nickelodeon star Emma Roberts.

We spend the film going through all these stories, at which point we reach the climax, which is horrifying. The film does not earn where it goes at the end, and it does not come off as shocking so much as cheap and depressing. Not to mention most of the main characters contemplate suicide at one point or another in the film’s duration. The film cuts between scenes of drug trips and partying and scenes of violence and depression. There is no definitive tone to rely on, and thus no one to get behind.

If the movie has a saving grace, it’s the performances of Emma Roberts and Chace Crawford. They try as hard as they possibly can to elevate the dire material, but the movie doesn’t come with them. I haven’t seen enough of Crawford’s work to come to a verdict on him, but I am convinced Emma Roberts is one of our better young actresses, and her slide into more grown-up films is something a lot of the young Disney stars like Zac Efron and Miley Cyrus could learn from. Making The Last Song and Charlie St. Cloud is not going to help you prove yourself as an actor, and even though Twelve is a massive misfire, it’s still the better route to go.

Twelve was directed by Joel Schumacher, who used to make more commercial material besides this film, but his career is going steadily downward. His past work includes Batman Forever, Batman & Robin, Phone Booth, The Phantom of the Opera, and The Number 23. None of those films are particularly good, but his attempt at arthouse cinema is a terrible piece of work. There some incredibly pretentious shots here, including flashbacks that take place in entirely white surroundings. What does it mean? It means it’s white.

When walking out of Twelve you have learned nothing new about anything, except that there is a group of rich white kids that do drugs, and that the ending was wretched. Stop the presses. Luckily, audiences have completely ignored this film this far. It showed on only 231 screens its opening weekend, coming away with $110,238, meaning it took in only $477 per screen. The A-Team had a higher per-screen average, and it was released in early June. One of these few screens was close to me, so I went to see it. I am now in an exclusive club, the club that has seen one of the worst movies this year will produce. It will disappear without fanfare.

Rating: (out of 4)

P.S.- There is a plotline about a kid falsely accused of murder which was actually marginally interesting. Halfway through the film the plot is abandoned. We don't ever find out what happens, the film just never checks in on him again.