A dark, compelling drama, with 50 Cent.

Every once in a while, you're sitting around on a Sunday night with your fiance, sipping some two-buck Chuck, scrolling through On Demand for some free movies to watch in the last remaining hours of your weekend, totally not expecting your entire world to be rocked.  Then, you say, innocently, in the last remaining moments of your innocence, something like, "what's Twelve?"  And then you see this:

"A dark, compelling drama, with 50 Cent."  WHAT?  Did the world end and I didn't know about it?  At first glance, this unbelievable line is what draws you in; it's what makes you stutter, mouth agape, clutching your two-buck Chuck as if it's the source of your only grip on reality, mumbling the words: "someone wrote that description with a straight face?"  Surely this is some elaborate joke?

And what about the rest of the description?  First, there's a character named "White Mike," played by "Gossip Girl's" Chase Crawford.  (Because if anyone has the underworld of drug dealing on lock down, it's Chase Crawford.  Also, parents, if your kid's nickname is White Mike," chances are he's going to drop out of his prep school and become a full time pot dealer. Drug dealers, if your nickname is "White Mike," everyone hates you, even white people. Especially white people.)  

Then, after you've read it a couple of times, you start to notice something else. You look up to vaguely hear the sounds of your fiance saying something like "you're drunk, and we've been watching this menu screen for 5 minutes, can we move on?"  But you know you can't, because there's more:  

"But when his cousin dies in a drug deal gone awry, everything changes for everyone."   

 I mean, where's the Pulitzer Prize committee when you need them?  "Everything changes for everyone." This is the most epic, sweeping film of all time!  How can we not watch this movie?  I want to see how things change for us!  

Reminding me of that time we accidentally paid money to see Apollo 18 because I refused to read the reviews beforehand, I pulled up some reviews.   Twelve was so bad that it earned (can I say "earned?") an extremely rare four percent critic approval on Rotten Tomatoes.  Look at this unbelievably all-negative sample screen shot from its page:

I mean, when a professional critic says her reaction to a film was that she wanted to punch the narrator in the face, that's a pretty strong denouncement.  (Plus, a little research reveals the narrator is Kiefer Sutherland himself,  so that's doubly awesome.)  Because Keifer Sutherland is not anywhere near the top of my list of people I'd like to punch in the face, (in fact, I don't even want to want to punch Kiefer Sutherland in the face), we would not watch Twelve.  Not now, maybe not ever. And nothing would change for anyone.

 But in searching for it I did find another movie called Twelve that's a "loose, Russian remake of Twelve Angry Men".  So, there's hope for next weekend.