The dark underbelly of Upper East Side trust-fund children is exposed once again in “Twelve,” though with an added gimmick: we now see everything happening on an alien planet. Director Joel Schumacher hasn’t made a science fiction picture, but he doesn’t seem to know very much about the behavior, attitudes, prejudices and lifestyles of these young socialite wannabes. Nor does he appear to have much interest in their humanity. This is Schumacher’s twenty-second directorial effort, and he has yet to understand how to frame a human conversation or to direct actors to convey believable human emotion, so he’s finally decided to test his limited skills with an extremely low budget offering comprised entirely of such moments.
“Twelve” is titled as such because of a powerful street drug with that unexplained moniker, one that we’re led to believe has infiltrated the small circle of pretty young things that comprise this entire cast. One person who cares for little involvement in this trend is White Mike (again, no explanation for that name), a young drug dealer who has a foothold in this mini-high society despite not being interested in getting high, having drinks, or impairing his judgment in any way. The cheekbones help.
White Mike won’t touch this mysterious Twelve, though he’s happy to deal anything else to get kids lit, thanks to a shady supplier from the projects. This dealer, who has no real interior life, is played by Curtis Jackson, who actually conveys an inner life beyond his dealings with these obnoxious moppets. One scene where a young girl clumsily propositions him in exchange for drugs rings true, in that it’s an exchange between someone very much out of their league and a calculating veteran of the trade examining the pros and cons of the situation — for leverage, she admits she’s a virgin, and the resigned dealer submits to temptation with the sullen knowledge he’s lost the negotiation. It stands out as the only real scene between human beings in the film.
“Twelve” follows White Mike over the course of three days leading up to the 18th birthday party for the “prettiest girl of every school,” which we learn from an oddly leering Kiefer Sutherland on narrator duties. Sutherland, who doesn’t seem to be a character in the narrative, growls entire sections of prose that ostensibly originated from the source novel, humorlessly describing the background of events onscreen as we see them happening. Sans a disembodied voice explaining to us that one character thought another was “the whackest drug dealer he’d ever met,” the film would work as a forgettably vapid slice of youthful, sub-Bret Easton Ellis nihilism, but Schumacher doesn’t resist an opportunity to give unsatisfactory, irrelevant background of why, say, White Mike likes to linger on rooftops, his trademark black trenchcoat draped over his shoulders like Batman. Though a brief moment where Sutherland, audibly desperate to keep a straight face, lists off euphemisms for sex as if wearing his trademark wolf’s smirk should become some sort of ringtone or internet meme.
Mike, the main character (because it‘s gotta be somebody), hides his profession from longtime crush Molly. Molly is sixteen and cute, and has long been infatuated with White Mike’s dour frown, listless detachment and painted-on five o’clock shadow. She knows nothing about Mike’s drug deals, and he keeps her at arm’s length with a story about how he works for his father’s restaurant in the wake of his mother’s death. Mike and Molly are played by Chace Crawford and Emma Roberts, and these two good-looking vessels are given no real motivation to play, particularly when together in a scene. An encounter right before the third act, meant as a wholly human interaction, plays as if it were directed by Tommy Wiseau. In the key moment for “Twelve” to engage its audience in a potential story outcome, both actors, sharing the screen for the first time, are inert and lost through oddly overlapping dialogue, inane non-sequiters, and altogether non-human behavior that masks the lack of any dramatic tension.
As the easiest and most pivotal moment of the film, it’s completely squandered by Schumacher’s typical gotta-get-this-done lack of dramatic focus. This is a common trait in this man’s career: even his earlier, more interesting films contained a nugget of truth, only to be brow-beaten by Schumacher’s need to surrender to propulsive TV theatrics and substance-less camera flair of the cheapest kind. He’s not a storyteller, he’s been pushing products for five decades now, and in “Twelve,” it looks like he experimented by shooting on a very tight schedule, and it shows. Take away Schumacher’s bells and whistles, and he becomes a college-level hack. Flashback sequences are shot on a stark white background and look like cheap rehearsal footage, while a number of drug-fueled fantasies are shot with a blurry slow-motion camera, a visual gimmick last seen on cable access programming.
Worse still, Schumacher fails to indulge in the debauchery and nastiness of genre. We’ve seen teens booze, overdose and bed-hop plenty of times before, so if you’re going to follow this formula for the umpteenth time, at least embrace a chance to titillate, as this is nothing if not an exploitation picture. The chasteness between White Mike and Molly emphasizes that, despite all characters being frustrated virgins or intoxicated fuckholes, no one gets their kit off, no one bumps and grinds, no one even really has a good time. There’s a brief transgressive rush in the third act as the movie culminates in a huge drug orgy, the top room occupied by a steroid-abusing musclehead clutching two samurai swords fetishistically, but the eventual burst of violence hinted from the film’s beginning is an aesthetic, mostly-offscreen failure. If you’re going to be dumb, really go for it. Don’t have your clearly unhinged antagonist discard his samurai sword to fire bullets into framed photos of his family.
At least it’s a talent showcase for some new faces, right? Front and center is wispy Rachel Bilson-alike Emily Meade, who is meant to stumble into each scene in a drug-fueled haze, occasionally sharing dialogue with her sea of teddy bears. Esti Ginzburg is aboard as the “gorgeous” Sara Ludlow, but she seems unaware if her rich bitch is supposed to be a caricature of a seductress or an honest-to-god human zit of a woman, which seems fitting, since she looks two decades too old for the role (and this is a movie with Ellen Barkin). And as the forever ignored nerd, Rory Culkin is Chris, a jittery virgin with a bad haircut, forever being used by the popular girls and dealing with a homicidal brother. Culkin, the most talented of his brothers, is heartbreaking, not only because he’s believable and grounded, but because his narrative is one of the few hints that, yes, this is a movie, and not some crude emotional finger-painting. [F]