Director: Roel Reine

Cast: Randy Orton, Tom Stevens, Brian Markinson

Synopsis: WWE Wrestler Randy Orton portrays Nick Malloy, an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) who finds himself caught in a deadly 12-round game of cat and mouse with a vigilante tied to the paramedic’s past.

DTV sequel specialist Roel Reine replaced Renny Harlin for 12 Rounds 2 Reloaded, a belated, unwanted sequel to the original 2009 movie which supplied a number of surprisingly effective action set pieces and cliffhanging moments. Quite why WWE decided the world needed a sequel — which, in reality, is nothing more than an inferior remake — other than for the obvious financial reasons, is something of a mystery, but here it is: another mindless, noisy action film with zero character development and minimal plot.

Randy Orton, yet another musclebound professional wrestler with aspirations to become a movie star, is Nick Malloy, a paramedic who witnesses a car smash while out on a date with his girlfriend, Sarah (Cindy Busby). He rushes to help, but is only able to save the lives of two of the three people involved in the crash. A year later, he and Sarah are now married and Nick is still working as a paramedic. He and his partner, Jay (Colin Lawrence — The Sixth Day) respond to a call for an adult male requiring medical assistance and are shocked to arrive at the location given to find a man with some device sewn into his stomach. At the moment they make that discovery, Nick receives a phone call from a mystery caller who informs him that, if he doesn’t want his wife to die, he must play 12 rounds of a deadly game.

So we’re firmly in the land of make-believe, then. Nick’s nemesis, played by Brian Markinson, is one of those screen villains whose skills know no bounds. Not only is he capable of performing surgery on that unlucky man in whom he implanted a bomb, he’s also able to install a network of hi-tech screens in one of those dark industrial corridors with pipes running along the ceiling; he can hijack apparently all the surveillance cameras in whatever city the action takes place, and block all and any signals transmitted from his dank lair. Each ‘game’ he plays with Nick is played out against the clock, so that we have not so much a race against time as a race against time after time after time ad nauseum. There’s a tough cop (Venus Terzo) who’s always a step or two behind the action with a sidekick who makes snap assessments which are invariably wrong, and an annoying sidekick in the form of the black sheep son (Tom Stevens) of a missing politician. They all run around looking serious while pounding rock music plays on the soundtrack and Reine has his cameraman ensure the camera is in motion at all times.

Ultimately, it’s a depressingly dull and empty movie which is about fifteen minutes too long and makes absolutely no effort to add anything to its predecessor. 12 Rounds 2: Reloaded is boring and pointless and really not worth your time.