Rating summary

Movie		1.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		1.5

Twelve Blu-ray Movie Review

Lifestyles of the rich and self-destructive.

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater December 31, 2010

I could probably begin and end this review by stating confidently that Twelve is, bar none, the worst film director Joel Schumacher has made in his increasingly less-than-illustrious career. That’s saying something, right? I mean, this is the guy that gave us 1997’s campy, homoerotic Batman & Robin, in which the dark knight wore a rubber suit festooned with perky nipples. So, if you’re just dropping in to find out if Twelve is worth your time, I’ll save you a few minutes and tell you up front—it’s not, it’s definitely not. I wish I could leave it at that—really, this is one film that doesn’t warrant any critical discussion—but I’m obligated to least explain my wholesale dismissal of Twelve as an unwatchable, pretentiously faux-profound piece of cinematic trash. Don’t feel obligated to read on unless you’re genuinely curious about what a mess the film is.

"White" Mike

Twelve is based on an eponymous novel by prep-school wunderkind Nick McDonnell, who was only seventeen when he penned the story. The film is a tangled, multi-character sprawl that loosely concerns the sordid lives of dysfunctional trust-fund teens on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Think of it as an ill-advised mash-up of Less Than Zero and The Kardashians, or, perhaps more accurately, an overlong episode of Gossip Girls as directed by Alejandro Iñárritu. Oh yeah, with drugs and guns and murders and depression. It’s bereft of any originality and a total chore to endure, mostly because the plasticine characters are obnoxious and wholly undeserving of our sympathy. The only thing more annoying than mopey, self-obsessed, silver-spoon teenagers who drive Porsches and throw extravagant parties while their parents are vacationing on Saint Martin is a film about these privileged F-ups and their boo-hoo Boho ennui.

There are, appropriately enough, an even dozen intertwined characters in Twelve, and you’ll care about none of them. The closest we come to a central protagonist is a philosophical drug dealer named White Mike (a miscast Chace Crawford), who isn’t rich, actually—he dropped out of school after his mother died—but who does eek out a living peddling weed to New York’s teenaged elite. The kids are jonesing for harder stuff, though, so White Mike has to call in his supplier from Harlem, Lionel (Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson), a thug who specializes in a drug called—surprise! —"Twelve," a heady cocaine/Ecstasy concoction. There are numerous complications. One, Lionel—unbeknownst to White Mike—kills Mike’s cousin in a drug deal-gone-bad. Two, Mike’s best friend Hunter (Phillip Ettinger) is framed for the murder. And three, virginal good girl Jessica (Emily Meade) gets addicted to the drug to the point of selling her body to Lionel just to get another hit. Meanwhile, a parade of subsidiary sycophants, pretty boys, lame-o losers, and lingerie-wearing sluts marches alongside the main characters, doing little more than padding the plot. The whole squalid affair comes to a violent end at, as one ditzy character puts it, “the type of party people lie to say they were at.” I won’t spoil it entirely, but let’s just say it involves the mental snapping of a juiced-up military school reject (Billy Magnussen) who collects pistols and samurai swords.

I don’t know what Joel Schumacher is thinking. He respectably tackled the coming-of-age genre once before—in 1983’s brat pack drama St. Elmo’s Fire—but I feel like he’s since lost all sense of quality control. Twelve is glossy and artificial, a style over substance gimcrack that wants to have something to say but can only manage to feign profundity. The film’s main offense—more than its shallow characterization and utter absence of emotional honesty—is that it relies on a grave, gravelly, near-constant voiceover narration from Kiefer Sutherland to point out exactly how we, the audience, are supposed to feel at any given moment. It’s as if Schumacher doesn’t trust us to discern his wry, jaded irony, so he has to over-obviously spell out everything for us. It’s patronizing, yes, but to add injury to insult—or vice versa—Kiefer’s remarks are bafflingly pretentious and completely devoid of meaning. He speaks in pithy, substance-free aphorisms, like “It’s all about want. If you don’t want something, you’ve got nothing.” It’s all dribbled out in too-cool-for-school, sarcasm-tinged tones, which seems to be the adopted attitude of the film’s richer-than-thou characters. One wonders what Holden Caulfield would make of these prep-school phonies.

Twelve Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Twelve was shot using the Red One digital camera and makes the transition to Blu-ray easily, with a 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer that's richly colored and more than adequately crisp. The image is lightly stylized, with pushed contrast levels that sometimes cause blacks to overwhelm shadow detail, although this does appear to be intentional. With a few low-lit exceptions, clarity is generally refined, cleanly rendering New York's city streets and revealing detail, like the individual hairs of White Mike's three-day-old stubble, the texture of Lionel's black leather jacket, and the plush fur of Jessica's teddy bears. Skin tones veer a bit toward yellowish at times, but this is only because the picture frequently carries a warm color cast. Aside from a few brief instances of mild aliasing—most noticeable in a series of fine lines on Lionel's jacket—I didn't spot any encode issues or compression-related problems. Noisiness is kept to a minimum, there are no macroblocking troubles, and no post-processing concerns, like over-the-top edge enhancement or DNR.

Twelve Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The film also sports a respectable DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track that offers exactly what you'd expect from a film like this—clear dialogue reproduction, a moderate amount of immersive ambience, and music that sounds dynamic and full. While New York City's soundscape isn't brought to life as powerfully as it could have been, you'll still hear some atmospheric street noise and party clamor taking up residence in the surround channels, along with the occasional cross-channel movement, like a basketball getting kicked through the rear speakers or gunshots loudly punching holes through the space behind your head. Vocals are clean, intelligible, and perfectly balanced, with no crackles, muffling, or drop-outs, and the music has a strong presence, sometimes activating the LFE channel for low-end potency.

Twelve Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The sole extras on the disc are "sneak" peaks at Mirrors 2, Predators, Vampires Suck, The A-Team, and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.

Twelve Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

I thought I had my "Worst of 2010" list in order, but late contender Twelve forced me to re-shuffle my rankings three days before the new year. Thanks Twelve. Maybe Joel Schumacher's film will appeal to the same set who hang on every word from Gossip Girls, but I can't imagine many others enjoying this tale of rich kid woe. Avoid at all costs.