For decades, Oreos were a simple thing. Sure, there were versions with a bit more goo or a bit less goo, but the formula was stable because the formula worked.
A handful of years ago, Oreo began innovating, churning out a series of “limited edition” flavors — “limited” because nobody figured that they were ever going to stand on a pedestal with the real thing. Some of those limited edition flavors were pretty good — I dug the BTS-branded “brown sugar pancake” flavor, and I’m a sucker for any of the peanut butter-related experiments — but most have been cloyingly sweet, a few have had no resemblance to the thing they were trying to evoke, and a few have been inedible.
Like Oreos, the heist genre is a malleable philosophical concept.
If you think about it, the best seasons of Mad Men, The Americans and Better Call Saul all were fundamentally structured as heist stories.
But television has been using its opportunities for longform storytelling to futz around with heist narratives — “Heist Double Stuf,” if you will — for decades, with mostly forgettable results.
You might remember FX’s Thief because Andre Braugher won an Emmy for it or Netflix’s Kaleidoscope for its “watch in any order you want” anarchy, but most recent entries in the genre are more like Hulu’s Culprits, which you probably haven’t even heard of.
Ultimately, it’s very possible that you’ll hear of Apple’s 12 12 12 (especially since if you’re reading this review, you just have). With Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan, it boasts a pair of reasonably well-known stars and, when I get to the part of this review that explains the premise, you’ll probably think the premise has some promise.
The chances of it remaining in any conversation about genre highlights, however, is close to nil. I’ve watched all eight episodes, and the first two illustrate the premise’s potential, the next four illustrate the premise’s limitations, and the last two scrap the premise entirely to deliver an increasingly irritating series of unexciting twists leading to an unsatisfying conclusion.
Mackie’s Jack Strickland, an FBI agent out to avenge the death of a partner he believes was murdered by master thief Paul Galvin (Dornan), explains the premise at the top of each episode.
“A high-asset robbery, professionally conceived, is 12 months in planning, 12 hours in execution. A bank robber who is not caught within 12 days is not caught at all,” he says, reciting from some FBI handbook.
See? 12, 12 and, also, 12. Get it? A bit like And And And, the original name of the band in The Commitments. Only worse.
So the plot, as created by Jim Keeble and Dudi Appleton, unfolds in three interlocking narratives that go something like this: There’s “The Heist,” an hour-by-hour breakdown as Paul, generically hot-headed brother Bobby (Jack Kesy), and a team of familiar specialists — including train-loving Kira (Kali Reis), master tunneler Serge (Jose Garcia), contortionist Alberich (Julius Feldmeier), inside woman Gunda (Hildegard Schroedter) and several others — break into a highly secure bank in Zurich. Their target? Roughly a billion dollars in cash newly deposited by some vicious Russian oligarchs.
There’s “The Planning,” a month-by-month breakdown, as we see the events that conspire to bring Paul out of a comfortable retirement with the lovely (and pregnant) Severine (Agathe Rousselle) and move pieces around the board in anticipation of the heist.
And there’s “The Takedown,” a day-by-day breakdown, as Strickland and Swiss cop Lena (Sallie Harmsen) are trying to catch the thieves, testing the meticulousness of Paul’s plan and the depths of Strickland’s obsession.
The first two episodes, directed by prestige streaming favorite Kari Skogland, are derivative but generally proficient. The opening shot, in which Alberich unfolds his body from a safe deposit box to emerge in a locked vault, is genuinely evocative even if it’s not the last time you’ll think of Ocean’s 11, and think that Ocean’s 11 did it better and more efficiently. The stakes are established simply, a few of the characters are introduced competently, and there’s a dual chase scene — intercutting foot and car pursuits through whichever European city is playing Zurich — that’s edited slickly.
Yes, I know all that praise is damningly faint, but nothing in 12 12 12 is inspired and I’m a sucker for even the most generic of heist pieces if production is clean and professional. This is all of those things, to a point.
Really, the “point” comes in the fourth episode, when a character gets buried in a man-made avalanche that was capable of burying a cabin, yet he’s just fine one scene later; and we discover that the avalanche was part of the getaway plan that’s never mentioned again in the planning segment, because it’s stupid and reliant on the sort of CG effects that the show never uses any other time and probably shouldn’t have used this time. It’s here that it first became clear to me that just because Paul is one of those preternaturally prognosticative protagonists capable of seeing the chess board a hundred moves in advance doesn’t mean the creators of 12 12 12 have similar gifts.
What started as a steady and balanced piece of storytelling begins to lurch along with no real destination in sight. Then the last two episodes are pretty much nonsense, which is disappointing because they’re directed by Skogland, who ditches the confidence of the first two episodes to stage a ludicrous nighttime chase/animal encounter that produced gales of unintentional laughter.
I’m not sure if the middle of the season meanders because of how uninteresting Jack and Paul are as adversaries, and that’s why Mackie and Dornan’s performances become less engaging; or if Mackie and Dornan’s performances become less engaging, and the show meanders as a result of their lack of intensity. Maybe it’s both.
Mackie is an actor who simmers well at a low level, but he isn’t the man for deep, all-consuming compulsion, which makes him a bad pick for a character who is a nondescript Ahab on the trail of a nondescript Moby Dick. Jack makes one or two references to his race being a driving force for his mania to avenge his deceased partner and set things right, but that has the feeling of a late-in-production note to dimensionalize the character. It fails. I don’t know if the series would have been better if Harmsen’s Lena had been as important to Jack and the series in the middle as she is at the beginning and end, but she’s forgotten for whole episodes at a stretch.
Dornan’s best performances have come either when he was able to go fully dark (The Fall) or fully quirky (Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar), but Paul is humorless and bland and his rough edges have been sanded away entirely.
If the three-timeline structure, giving us the two main characters in three very different contexts, fails to yield anything like a compelling set of foils, it has served no purpose at all.
The supporting characters rarely stand out either. Kesy’s interpretation of Bobby’s scheming volatility is used as a consistent and never convincing red herring, without the character ever really feeling dangerous or like a person. I always like Olafur Darri Olafsson, but I have no idea what his character’s role is in the heist. At least I know his name is “Blasius,” when there are three or four people who help with the heist in unspecified ways and might not even have names. Reis, so good in True Detective: Night Country, is barely used at all. Patrick Fabian has one or two good scenes as one of Jack’s FBI bosses, who resents him for multiple good reasons.
In Oreo terms, this “special edition” isn’t as good as the BTS Brown Sugar Pancake, nor is it as icky as the Apple Pie a la Mode, which managed to simulate neither apple pie nor ice cream in any recognizable way. But if the question is “Has this heist show done anything to improve on the original formula, or even to justify permanence in the heist genre firmament?” the answer is an unequivocal “Nope.”
