I ducked into the dollar movie last Wednesday to watch 12 Rounds, which is kind of a puzzling film. At first glance, it’s a cross between Speed and Die Hard 3, in which our New Orleans cop hero is forced by a vengeful international terrorist to cater to his every whim, one round at a time, or risk the death of his pixie-looking but tough wife. And within the set time limits, for added tension. The characters’ puzzle-solving skills are dumbed down just a little too much for my personal taste, possibly as an artifact of the WWE audience that was its primary target, but by and large it’s a serviceable action movie as put together by a, y’know, vengeful international terrorist.

And then there’s this weird turning point in the final act where the cops and FBI guys suddenly get a lot more intelligent than they’d been at any previous moment, and using clues that do not actually exist anywhere in the prior scripting, they determine that this movie has a twist ending wherein revenge was never really the point. And suddenly there are unreferenced helicopter pilots in the cast, and it’s all very much like a particularly imaginative audience member at one of the test screenings had said, “You know what would be a cooler ending than what we just watched?” and the writer and director had nodded and just created this new, purportedly cooler ending out of whole cloth without worrying about the fact that they needed to alter the rest of the movie for that to make any kind of sense.

This is maybe not as bad as it sounds. I mean it was bad, no question, but it was also interesting in a head-spinning kind of way to see the rules of plotting be so flagrantly ignored. Very few movies are (let’s say) brave enough to make this kind of artistic decision. Kudos?