Listen, we weren’t expecting anything approaching quality from Joel Schumacher’s upcoming “Twelve,” but even at his very worst the films from the hack director have always had somewhat coherent trailers. Until now.
We’re guessing that whoever distributors Hannover House hired to cut the trailer couldn’t make heads or tails of what they were working with as the excessively long, three minute spot tells us absolutely nothing about the film. The trailer starts off with a droning, monotonous voiceover by Keifer Sutherland and quickly goes downhill. Seriously, see if you can pay attention to whatever the hell Sutherland is saying for longer than thirty seconds. Anyway, the film stars Chace Crawford as some sort of drug slinging youth and then a bunch of stuff happens. Frankly, it looks like a random assortment of rehearsal footage from “The Rules Of Attraction” with stand ins
playing the parts. Oh yeah, 50 Cent plays *shocker* a drug dealer leading to a sequence that looks lifted right out of “Traffic.”
In any event, we’re hardly surprised the film bombed at Sundance this year. Here’s the synopsis (in case you still care) from the festival guide:
Based on the critically acclaimed novel by Nick McDonell, written when he was only 17 years old, Twelve is a chilling chronicle of privileged urban adolescence on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Set over spring break, the story follows White Mike, a kid with unlimited potential, who has dropped out of his senior year of high school and sells marijuana to his rich, spoiled peers. When his cousin is brutally murdered in an east Harlem project, and his best friend is arrested for the crime, White Mike is hurled on a collision course with his own destiny.
Led by director Joel Schumacher, a talented ensemble cast perfectly captures the obvious pain of children teetering on the brink of adulthood. Schumacher counters their overindulged behavior with operatic staging and a literary voice-over. For every decade, there are moments when youth culture is frozen in “art,” to be reveled in by the generation that lived it and observed by those that didn’t. That is Twelve.
Anyhow, Emma Roberts, Rory Culkin, Ellen Barkin also star and probably wish they didn’t. Hannover House will release the film on July 2nd against “Twilight: Eclipse” where it will surely tank: