12 12 12 review on Apple TV: Jamie Dornan impresses in a silly thriller that gets the job done

Detailed summary

Television: The Co Down actor puts in one of his strongest turns as a Queens bank robber desperate to quit the game but dragged back in ...

Jamie Dornan takes a decent swing at a New York accent as he plays a career criminal trying to score one last pay-day in the agreeably cliched heist thriller 12 12 12 (Apple TV from Thursday).

If you like television that reminds you of older, better shows and films, then you’ll love this well-assembled nonsense. The biggest influence is the creaky Kiefer Sutherland action caper 24, in which each season occurred over a single day.

That idea receives a convoluted remix in 12 12 12, which takes its name from the premise that a successful bank robbery requires 12 months to plan and 12 hours to execute – and that the culprit will walk free unless they’re caught within 12 days.

As if that wasn’t confusing enough – trust us, it is – each episode unfolds across these three timelines: the planning, the robbery and the aftermath. But don’t worry. In practice, this just means lots of cutting back and forth between Dornan’s rogue-with-a-heart-of-gold Paul Galvin (why is he named after a former Kerry footballer?) and his FBI nemesis, who has the very FBI name of Jack Strickland and is played by Avengers star Anthony Mackie.

12 12 12 does not have a single original idea in its eight episodes. This turns out to be one of the best things about it. There are echoes of the De Niro-Pacino dynamic in Heat in the love-thy-enemy adversarial relationship between Paul and Jack (maybe they’re more alike than ever imagined?).

The fact that the heist is in Zurich, meanwhile, gives Apple permission to cut loose with the Bourne Identity/Eurothriller stereotypes – including a car chase in which one of Jack’s Swiss liaisons gives pursuit in a tiny hatchback. Then there’s the Christmas Day setting. This obviously evokes the Greatest Christmas Movie of All Time – which is Die Hard and not the Father Ted Xmas special, no matter what Irish social media would have you believe.

Mackie gives good Pacino as the brooding Jack – a man so obsessed with catching his quarry that he’s prepared to work through the…

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Opening of the article, excerpted from The Irish Times. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.