’12 12 12′ Season 1 Review: What Happens When You Already Know Who Walks Away?
’12 12 12′ lands on Apple TV on November 13 with two episodes up front and a new one every Friday after that, eight in all. It sets Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan on opposite sides of a bank job, and it comes from creators Jim Keeble and Dudi Appleton. The pairing alone was enough to make me curious about this heist series.
Every episode opens with the idea that a robbery takes twelve months to plan, twelve hours to carry out, and goes cold if nobody is caught within twelve days. The show then bounces between all three stretches, following Dornan’s Paul Galvin, a Queens bank robber who wants out of the life, and Mackie’s FBI agent Jack Strickland, who cannot let him go. The job itself unfolds in Zurich around Christmas, which gives the whole thing a wintry, slightly absurd glamour.
Here is where I land on the structure, which is both the best idea and the biggest problem. Cutting between three timelines gives the series a restless energy and a steady supply of questions. But every time it leaps ahead to show who made it out in one piece, the tension of the scene you just left drains away, and you are left asking how instead of whether.
That trade pays off in some episodes and backfires in others. When a character is cornered in the planning stretch and the story simply jumps elsewhere, I admired the nerve but missed the squeeze of a sequence allowed to play out. A heist story lives on pressure, and this one keeps lifting the lid before the pot boils.
The performances are what hold it together. Dornan plays Paul as a man who is tired of the game and still far too good at it, and he finds warmth in a character who could easily have been a smirking cliche. Mackie is all gravity and obsession as Jack, and the two of them share more screen time than the setup suggests, which is a gift because their scenes crackle. Jack Kesy, as Paul’s brother Bobby, adds a welcome layer of family baggage.
The twists keep coming, and plenty of them work, especially early on when the show is still laying down its pieces. Others are easy to spot a mile away, and the familiar pattern of loyalty flipping into betrayal and back again starts to feel mechanical. Over eight hours the middle stretch loses some of its snap, and the characters rarely get the room to deepen because the plot is always hurrying to the next time jump.
The closing episodes are where it frays most. Instead of tightening the knot, the final stretch tangles itself, reaching for fresh shocks when it should be delivering payoff, and the ending left me more shrugging than satisfied. It is a shame, because the earlier hours show how well this idea can work when it trusts its leads.
Still, I kept pressing play. This is the kind of glossy, festive, slightly ridiculous thriller that suits a cold evening and a long couch session, and the chemistry between its two stars carries it past most of its stumbles. For a show with so little interest in originality, it has real charm and a few sharp surprises. I would give ’12 12 12′ 7 out of 10.
Did the three timelines make you lean in or tune out, and does this one deserve a spot on your holiday watchlist, so tell me in the comments whether you agree?
