A strange film. Picked it up due to the cast and Joel Schumacher, which has made some OK action movies. It starts interesting and different; even the voice-over is OK, which later on in the movie falls unnatural and downright awful in describing thoughts.If he film had gone on with assembling the stories into an interesting story, but what we think is the main story, a murder, is just nothing more than fragmented stuff about grossly exaggerated fu**ed up teenagers played by some otherwise talented young stars. This is quite pointless and quite depressive.What you really could get out of this, you get the first half hour. The rest just downward spirals. Turn to "The perks of being a wallflower" or even of of Larry Clarks movies instead. I'm sorry the good start wasn't followed up here. Sorry to say this is pointless, unattractive and pretentious.

The screenplay is hectic and rambling, above all, in the beginning when it is difficult to follow different names and references to names and places changing fast (probably okay for those knowing New York / Manhattan well). Contrast between flashbacks, the main character's reflections, and the real street life is also too big. The best in this movie are Chase Crawford as White Mike, Rory Culkin as Chris Kenton and Kiefer Sutherland's voice (as narrator). The rest are rather ordinary, schematic... Well, the book the screenplay is based on was written by a 17-years-old guy, but the movie could have been more fluent.Twelve can be a warning movie against drugs and addictions, but it is not a masterpiece - especially if considering the name of the director, Joel Schumacher.

I wouldn't go so hard on this movie, because the project seems to be focused on concerns about drugs hitting youth so hard. This theme is the key for the plot, then. Usual standards we use to say that was a good movie or was not should be adjusted in this case.It's not documentary or journalistic language, but it has a very strong presence of the narrator. It'd be interesting to discuss that, because the narrator dominates the story. Is it good or bad? Well, it is good if you want a different approach on these matters, but it is not so good if you wanted a more intense contact with the characters. I felt both ways. I'd like the characters to be more present in the movie, but I know why they are not, while there is the narrator instead, and there is a good reason for that.A narrator at first is not forbidden nor has a special receipt for it. It is aesthetics, I mean, it works or doesn't for a given style and a story. If narrator's speech can express something essential in the story in a very singular way, then it's a match, and I believe this is the case. This narrator speech created a special thriller climate, brought more context information and finally gave the whole movie a sense of loneliness, isolation and powerlessness. That's why the narrator takes most part of the voices of everyone. This lack, this silence, means something we have to think about. So, if this story was important to be told in 90 minutes, it was not bad at all. Of course we would like a further development of the relationship between White Mike and Molly. Except for the narration sequences and the theme itself, the possible romance between them would be the central key of the plot, in a "regular" movie, but there was not enough space and time to show more involvement and complications, in this one. There was another story to be told.The final result is a bigger impact on the drug problem, in a culture where considerable part of the youth is going in a doubtful direction, without good perspectives or conditions to think about their lives and their world.

I had some curiosity in watching Twelve, director Joel Schumacher's most recent film, because even though many people identify this director with his most notorious failures (Batman Forever and Batman & Robin), I think that when he worked with the correct material and actors, he could make very solid films (like The Lost Boys, Veronica Guerin and Tigerland).Unfortunately, Twelve belongs to the list of Schumacher's bad films. This movie is basically an affected and pretentious rehash of the TV series Gossip Girl seasoned with an artificial "gangsta" taste, irritating dialogs and pathetic performances. Oh, and instead of Kristen Bell's voice as the omnipresent narrator from Gossip Girl, we have Kiefer Sutherland's unmistakable voice bringing forced pseudo-philosophical monologues which try to bring gravity to the characters' puerile lives.To start with, the emotions evoked by Twelve feel forced, and I found its characters to be absolutely irritating. The screenplay does not have a point, and I never had even a remote interest in the main character's salvation or failure.In conclusion, Twelve is an atrocious film which genuinely made me feel like wasting my time. In other words, don't make the same mistake I did, and avoid this film.