12 12 12 review – Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan’s super fun heist hunt

From the moment a contortionist crawls out of a bank vault, the 12-hour hunt for the culprits is a thrilling ride. Just suspend your disbelief a bit and strap in for a fantastic time

A contortionist crawls out of a safety deposit box in the wall of an underground Swiss bank vault, legs wrapped around his waist, feet resting on his lumbar spine, landing on hands and displaced knees on the tiled floor. You know what? SOLD. You have just earned my undivided attention for the next hour of whatever you want to present to me.

Under such highly promising circumstances does the new heist thriller 12 12 12 begin. It stars Anthony Mackie of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Jamie Dornan (building a nice career since 2013’s The Fall, if we gloss over the 50 Shades movies and the one where he played a romantic hero who believed he was a bee) as its antagonists locked in an international cat-and-mouse game over eight episodes. One can only imagine the anguish when no one could make it stretch to 12.

The 12s, it rapidly and disappointingly becomes clear, are the point. The high – heist – concept is explained to us at the top of each of the eight (like an octet of knives to the producers’ hearts!) episodes. A big heist – and our bendy guy is limbering up to gather $800m in Swiss notes, a literal ton of money – takes 12 months to plan, 12 hours to execute and if the perpetrators are not caught within 12 days, they tend not to get caught at all.

But wait! you say. A grand theft could take any amount of time to plan. And to execute. And what do you mean there’s a 12-day cut-off point for capture? That seems … unlikely. To which one can only reply: did you not just see the contortionist crawl out of a safety deposit box in the wall of an underground Swiss bank vault, legs wrapped round his waist, feet resting on his lumbar spine, and landing on hands and displaced knees on the tiled floor? You did? Right, then. Tcch.

Each episode plays out over the three timelines, so we gradually see how the audacious robbery was put together, how it went down and how, in the here and now, those 12 days to escape are panning out. The short answers are: very well, thank you; could have been better, and are you really still pretending that’s a thing?

The longer answers? Well, the heist around which the series revolves was masterminded by Pauly Galvin (Dornan), son of a New York ne’er do well, brother of Bobby (Jack Kesy) and fiance of a joyfully pregnant Severine (Agathe Rousselle), with whom he had started a new and crime-free life in Marseille. Just when you think you’re out, of course, is when they pull you back in and Bobby duly reveals that his gambling debts have placed his own, Pauly’s, Severine’s and the foetal Galvin’s life in danger and that the baddies to whom he is in hock require Pauly’s legendary robbery-planning services. This is why you should never become a recidivist if you have siblings. Your life is not your own.

So Pauly reluctantly Hannibal Smiths it and gradually a plan and a team come together. It includes Severine’s father Serge (José Garcia) because Pauly needs a tunnel and Serge is – to give you the script’s full description – “a tunneller”.

The 12-hour timeline is the most fun one. The contortionist, an unaccounted for mercury tilt switch in the floor of the vault, a big underground drill, a diverted subway train for the literal ton of cash, an Alpine retreat and jet-skis aplenty – none of the suavity of Thomas Crown’s affairs perhaps, but just as much satisfaction.

Dominating the 12-hour “Takedown” timeline is Mackie as grieving, embittered, self-loathing FBI agent Jack Strickland, so called because he is stricken by his part in the death of a fellow agent when they attempted to foil the Galvin brothers’ last robbery together, in Newark. Now he is in Zurich following up a tip-off that they might be about to strike again, and even the Swiss consider him to be no fun at parties.

Unlike the complacent native force, Strickland has US street smarts and is soon seeing clues they have all missed and is closing in on his prey. This starts immediately, which makes even more of a mockery of the supposed premise, which surely must at least be that – like the “golden hour” after a murder – you have so long to gather leads before the trail goes cold. Not 12 days/one hour to put handcuffs on your guy. But again, we remind ourselves of the contortionist and adjust our suspension of disbelief accordingly.

12 12 12 is fantastically slick, and fantastically well-shot and structured, but once the novelty of the triple timelines wears off there is the inescapable feeling that that is where all the inspiration went. Everything else – the troubled cop, the bad guy trying to go straight, the troublesome brother, the endangered new family, the gang fracturing under pressure – has been done many times before. It’s great fun. But is it 12/12 fun? No. It is three out of five.